http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The works of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski are featured at ImageKind.com, an online art community for selling originals, limited edition prints, posters and other art.In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built elaborate and ingenious ways to escape! http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Essex landscape artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The exhibition of new works by Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculpture http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Colchester artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters. Find Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters at Art.com http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built this tank using teachests covered with Constable prints, old brooms, letterboxes and various other recycled materials http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris, a gangly beanpole of a man with a Worzel Gummidge mop of sandy hair, .... and consists of one man, artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk In a great deal of his previous work, Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has been dealing with history. Household appliances, often http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk themselves junk-shop antiques http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk A B O U T T H E A R T I S T I've loved drawing since I was a kid. I earned my first commission in second grade,earning a penny for drawing Charlie Brown for a classmate. I graduated high school in 1980,the year of "stagflation." Rather than enter art school, I did the sensible thing and went to engineering school. That would have been great, if I had any interest in engineering. After working for two weeks as an engineer, I quit. I decided to change careers and enter the world of advertising art. It was a difficult transition. I paid my dues working in darkrooms (remember those?) before finally getting a job with a small agency.Over the years I've created advertising art for a variety of companies, including Foxwoods, Carnival Cruise Lines, Boston Market, Papa Gino's, Newport Creamery, Abbott Laboratories, and Holmes Products. But I've come to the point in my life where I want to create my own art. I'm currently in the middle of creating what I hope will be dozens of realistic wildlife illustrations. I'm very pleased with the way things are progressing. I plan on doing several illustrations in each animal series. After that, I may do some religious art. My Catholic faith is central to my life, and I hope that all of my art glorifies God in some way.©2008 Chris Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s solitary way: Get out while you can' David Thomson Essex landscape artist Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured topographies-his reconfiguration of topography itself. The question of transcendence and landscape could be posed as a kind of hedge fun management question (Dobrowolski loves to play with the lingo of the corporate and financial world). If you're trying to take off in an experimental aircraft in which thirteen pilots in a similar situation have been killed, and there is a short wall of tight, interwoven trees in front of you, do you hedge your bets and bail out, or do you give it more juice and see what happens in the sky? That Dobrowolski is willing to try such capers-opting variously for literal hedge and literal sky-merely means that he has the kind of gross physical courage for which young men in war get medals. Of far greater interest is the fact that Dobrowolksi's courage infuses his aesthetic. I've waited a long time for this. Beauty can be brave. Dobrowolski's scapes-landscapes, mindscapes, escapes-are delicately rendered, lovely and complex and gorgeous. The vision here is Miltonic, a coupling of luciferian luster with the industrial sublime, every pipe and buckle and sulfurous engine precisely right. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Dobrowolski can do it all, abstract, mimetic, the whole shebang. He's scoured the modern era, and taken what he needs, 'ransacking the center,' Milton might say, 'with impious hands.' Dobrowolski both embodies the age and rises above it. His own valuation of the work should be noted but, in the main, discounted. While his work maintains the creative tension between event and artifact and hectors the participant-observer into the kind of Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole space-time freakout where a diorama might feel as large as the county of Humberside, Dobrowolski is content to laugh as if such conjunctions were merely escapade. Landscape picaresque. He told me he'd made an old car you could pedal and had some funny adventures with the police, and I imagined a hodgepodge. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The car is many things-an evocation of a particular landscape, a portion of a master raconteur's tale, a museum piece, an ongoing vehicle for transcendence-but let's be sure to bring the literalists on board here: those bits of pipe and rubber are pretty. I took the kids to feel/see/hear Dobrowolski perform the other night in a converted church space on top of one of the few hills in Essex, near a pile of stone which turned out to be the oldest Roman arch in England, in the city of Colchester, which had had its heyday a couple of millennia earlier. Dobrowolski organized one version of his material as a linear progression, a sort of bildungsroman whereby the artist comes of age in a complex struggle to build a conveyance suitable to the integrity of his quest-to escape from art college. And not just any art college, but the one constructed on the same Hull pier from which Robinson Crusoe had sailed centuries earlier. The real Robinson Crusoe. I don't take the word of artists about their work and haven't done, not since the day when, say, I realized that Homer seemed to have covered up Odysseus's lies about his sailing adventures. But of course Dobrowolski is both Odysseus and Homer, and the glory is in the telling. Dobrowolski did escape from art college, over and over, in works of art and artifice from his own hands: a sailboat, a car, a hovercraft, a tank, an airplane, all of it from bits of flotsam found in the detritus of a life lived on the edge. And what stands out about all this art is how real it is, in every sense. Real sailboat, real car, real hovercraft. It's not far from real tank and real airplane to real life, and who will bridge the gap for us if not Dobrowolski? Dobrowolski collects and masters genre-Zapruderesque documentary, airplane hydraulics, poetry, drama, welding, comedy, landscape painting-the way some people pick up seashells. His refurbishings alone suggest multiple skill sets. Is there anything Dobrowolski can't do? Watching Dobrowolski in action, I thought about the great escape artists of the modern era. Elvis Presley and Walter Benjamin, who almost got out (the latter made it to the Spanish border before he hung himself). Houdini-so far so good. Slavomir Rawicz, whose The Long Walk maintains its cult credentials even today and reminds us of the intertwining of event and event-production. That book, too, considers the notion, which works well either as fiction or fact, that Poles are the toughest people on the planet. Certainly Dobrowolski's oeuvre is a love poem to his irascible dad, the Polish soldier and ex-landowner, and breaking out of childhood-self-creation-is probably the most fraught of human experiences. If I insist upon Dowbrowolski's triumph as a landscape artist, here in Constable country, it is not to limit the UK artist's palate but merely to appropriate it for my own work on the Essex sublime. Can we have travel without destination? Destination has degraded travel writing to a series of predictable remarks upon the noteworthiness of landscape objects. No one visits Essex, anymore than they would the Humberside of Dowbrowolski's pilgrimages. Essex is what you escape from. But that's not enough. If it's the sublime you want-and, God help me, I do-then you must escape over and over. To get to the sublime, to the transcendent, then follow Dowbrowolski's trajectory, his flight path. And that means breaking out over and over. Once is never enough. Essex for me is both a writing project and an American's experience of landscape, and Dowbrowolski has surely, for anyone who walks or writes or sees, vastly increased the canon of worthy sight lines. Can you escape from Essex? Yes, repeatedly. If you clear your palate enough, you can taste the sublime. What better place than the great muddy eastern fringes of Milton's island? Chris Dobrowolski is back in Essex for a while. East of England, east of Eden. As the Puritan poet said of Adam and Eve when they left the pretty garden and set to work: the world was all before them. Copyright © David Thomson David Thomson teaches graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Toronto. He has lived in Essex for two years, and is writing a book on Essex landscape entitled 'View from a Kettle.' Jump to main navigation bar Look at other sections: please select... Events Families Young People Courses, Conferences & Talks Events for People with Disabilities Community Programmes Adult Learning Resources Things To Do ADULT LEARNING RESOURCES Creative Writing in Museums Memory Maps What are Memory Maps? Contemporary Writing on Essex Essex Trails Essex & Suffolk Paintings & Drawings Essex objects Historical Writing about Essex Essex University Creative Writing Course How to Get Involved Written contributions 1939 Memories of Walton on the Naze On Southend Pier Barking Creek Cities of the Universe Cold nostalgia of the air shaft Luke Howard's Constable Chris Dobrowolski’s Solitary Way Writers and Books connected with Essex Weblinks to Museums in Essex, Suffolk & Middlesex English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Trails & Kits for Adults Jump to search Home Your Visit Exhibitions Collections Research & Conservation Activities & Events Schools & Students Support Us Shop Online Jump to breadcrumb What's On Sitemap Search: Jump to footer You are here: Home > Activities & Events > Adult Learning Resources > Memory Maps > Written contributions > Chris Dobrowolski’s 9 January 2006 Commercialisation of art the focus of new University exhibition A new exhibition at the University of Essex Gallery will investigate commercialism in the art world through a range of intriguing pieces including a modified Scalextric track. The exhibition of new works by Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks. Each work in the exhibition, which opens on Monday 16 January, concentrates on an aspect of promoting and marketing art. All the works incorporate a painted landscape background and the centre-piece will be a toy van, which will circle the Gallery on a Scalextric track, inviting us to 'buy my paintings' from a loudspeaker. Since his days as a student at Humberside University and the Royal College of Art, Dobrowolski has been uncomfortable about the art market. He explained: 'To justify its position at the top of our cultural hierarchy, fine art takes on the holier than thou stance of being good for you. It is supposed to have intellectual or philosophical aspirations and is not meant to be mere entertainment, decoration or a status symbol. 'I, like many artists, have a problem when it comes to promoting and selling work as this commercialisation always seems to denigrate the art to being just a commodity or ornament. With these hang-ups it is probably no coincidence that, financially, I am a very unsuccessful artist.' Dobrowolski is best-known for his large-scale artistic inventions which have included a fully-functioning hovercraft made out of plastic bottles washed up on the banks of the River Humber, a tank made from reproductions of Constable paintings, and an aeroplane. The exhibition by Chris Dobrowolski will be at the University of Essex Gallery in Wivenhoe Park, Colchester from 16 January to 11 February. Admission is free and opening times are as follows: Monday to Friday 11am-5pm and Saturday 1pm-4.30pm. Chris will also give a performance of his live art lecture on 25 January at 8pm at the Colchester Arts Centre. Tickets for this event cost £6 (£3.50 for concessions) and are available by telephoning 01206 500900. Notes to editors: For further information and/or images of works from the exhibition, please contact either Jessica Kenny, Gallery Director on 01206 872074, or e-mail kennj@essex.ac.uk, or Kate Clayton in the Public Relations Office on 01206 873529, or e-mail proffice@essex.ac.uk. Chris Dobrowolski will be on campus between Tuesday 10 and Friday 13 January. If you would like to arrange either an interview or photo opportunity please contact Jessica Kenny or Kate Clayton using the contact details above.Contacts Media enquiries at the University of Essex Public Relations Office, telephone +44 1206 872400, e-mail proffice@essex.ac.uk An online form to request press releases from the University. More news releases ~ University of Essex home page Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom. © Copyright 1999, 2006 University of Essex. All rights reserved. Page last modified by the Web Support Unit, 17 January 2006. Page 1 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsHull Through the Eyes of a SculptorIntroductionChris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range ofopportunities to investigate contemporary sculpture, local history and publicart, and in particular to investigate how ideas and meanings can becommunicated through three dimensional form.This resource has been designed to support a visit to the Ferens Art Gallerysculpture collection, by allowing pupils to investigate a particular work indetail, either before or after their visit. It is also designed, by following aspectsof the commissioning and artist’s working process, to support in particular unit9c of the Art and Design curriculum.Curriculum LinksThis learning journey can be used as a resource for:KS3 Art and design:• Unit 8C – Shared View• Unit 9C – Personal Spaces, Public PlacesInspiring Learning for All:• Knowledge Skills and Understanding• Activity, Behaviour and Progression• Enjoyment, Inspiration and Creativity• Attitudes and ValuesAbout the ArtistChris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculptureat the Royal College of Art from 1994 to 1996. He has described his earlierwork as being a personal exploration of landscape, seascape, skyscape andescape. Page 2 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museums‘I draw inspiration from the integrity of things that come about from peopletinkering around in their garden shed or garage. The end result of this ‘tinkering’often speaks volumes even when the maker might not consider themselves anartist. I am one of the last of that post war generation who, as a child, used tomake pram wheeled go-carts in the garden shed. With my art I try to capture thatelusive state of mind experienced when working without the ulterior motives thatmaking ‘Art’ imposes upon me’Chris Dobrowolski 1998Amongst the work he created during his time in Hull was a home-made boatmade from recycled materials. His maiden voyage on the Humber attractedthe attention of both the media and the Humber coastguards. The latterensured his safe return to shore.The CommissionHull as a major port city has always attracted artists who were interested in amaritime theme. The collections and displays of many of Hull’s museumsreflect not only Hull’s maritime history, but also the part played by artists inrecording and drawing inspiration from this industry.There are many ways to ‘capture’ or ‘reflect’ this heritage so in 1998 a newwork was commissioned from Chris Dobrowolski for the exhibition ‘All at Sea’.The exhibition was to focus on a maritime them from the 17thcentury to thepresent day. The gallery curator had liked Chris’ work which was relevant tothis theme and thought that a new piece from him would be a good elementof the exhibition. It would also add a new contemporary sculpture to thegallery’s permanent collection from an artist who had chosen to study andwork in Hull, like many other artists before him.The DrawingsThe drawings on this page are an exciting insight into the artists workingprocess. They show how the artist moves through a process of developingideas, thinking about what he would like to communicate with his work,rejecting a variety of ideas before coming to a final conclusion.Notice in drawing 1 how Dobrowolski sketches out his starting points in asimple bullet point list, and uses very quick drawings to illustrate, in this case to Page 3 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsthe curator, how he has already begun to make, but reject. This easily reflectsthe ‘tinkering’ process.In drawing 2 the artist begins to ‘deconstruct’ or ‘dissect’ the components ofa seascape dividing them into things that you can see (‘The Sky’, ‘The Sea’)and things which are not depicted as such (‘Beneath the Sea’). He alsocomments on his lack of maritime knowledge, with a lovely metaphor of an‘imaginary seadog sitting on my shoulder’In drawing 4 you can see Dobrowolski clearly thinking through the symbolismof his found materials. Tin cases ‘say’ something very different from‘something more utilitarian’.Drawing 5 shows the final sculpture, annotated to clarify his intentions.Another interesting part of this last drawing is his inclusion of ten records herejected.The Sculpture‘Siren’ is a sculpture constructed from a collection of trunks, ship parts and anold record player which features the 1955 hit single ‘Stowaway’ by BarbaraLyon. From this collection of simple and recycled objects, Dobrowolski hascreated a particularly poetic work of art dealing with the maritime theme. Thetitle ‘Siren’ asks us to think about Homers Odyssey, and the adventures ofOdysseus. We begin then to think about the female singer whose songattracts us to engage with the sculpture. Are we to imagine packing thesetrunks to seek our fortune? Where might the next ship leaving port take us?Are we to be shipwrecked? Or, if we begin to think about who did in factpack these trunks; what became of them? how many stories does Hull haveto tell as a major port?this is what makes Chris Dobrowlski’s sculpture such a successful work; it startsmaking us think on many levels without offering simple answers. We are leftwondering the answers to many of our questions; as we are also leftwondering about the many ‘old seadog’ tales which remain untold. Page 4 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsSiren in the words of the artist‘Here’s a run down on how it works technically. Looking through theporthole in the bottom of the top box you can see right down to floor level as I’ve cut through the other boxes.Mounted on the inside is a movement censor (the kind that trigger securitylights in the dark). the action of looking through the porthole turns on alamp and an old record player at the bottom of the piece. On the recordplayer is an old 78 by a singer called ‘Barbara Lyon’ called ‘Stowaway’. thismusic comes up and out of the cowl vent mounted on the top of thebottom box.The whole thing dismantles easily into three pieces and the record playercan be removed should it ever need to be fixed. I even managed to find acopy of the record should anything happen to the original. Having saidthat there isn’t a lot to go wrong with it as making it aesthetically simple hasmade it practical as well. It stands about 4 foot high a the lip of the openbox.’Chris Dobrowolski (March 1998)SirensChris has chosen a title which can be read in a number of ways. A siren, canbe‘a device that emits a loud prolonged signal or warning sound’The Concise Oxford English Dictionary.Sirens were also figures of ancient Greek mythology:‘sea nymphs with the head of a woman and the body of a bird who luredsailors to their doom by their songs.’Halls Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art.The most well know story is that of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseusencounters the Sirens. Odysseus orders his sailors to fill their ears with wax toavoid hearing their deadly song. He meanwhile is tied to the mast of his ship,so he can hear but resist their songs. Page 5 Hull Museum Education www.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsScenes from mythology have always been popular with artists and the Ferenshas another work with this subject, a large oil painting called ‘Ulysses and theSirens’ by Herbert Draper. There are several versions of this work including oneat Leeds City Art Gallery.Stow-a-wayStowaway was the song chosen by Chris from a range of potential records.He notes his rejects on drawing no. 5. It was a top ten hit in 1955 for the singerBarbara Lyon. The lyrics below show how the song adds another dimension tothis interesting sculpture:I’d like to go away – be a stowawaytake a trip on a ship,let my worries blow a-wayThere are still many treasure islandsthat wait to be explored,and the wide worldis full of wonders for me.When a ship’s standing in the harbour,I wish myself aboardand I hide ‘til the rolling tidecarries me to sea.Then I go sailing far off to Zanzibar,Though my dream places seembetter than they really are,‘way down deep in my heartI keep them as people will often do,who are stay at home stow aways too.I’d like to too.Lyric by Carolyn Leigh Page 6 Hull Museum Education http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.ukhttp://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk museumsWesterdale Yard – Robert WilloughbyMany maritime artists came from a background as sign painters or frompainting ships timbers. They were almost always local figures, who focussed onships easily accessible to them, and were patronised by local owners.‘All the artists were in the thrall of the local ship owners who wantedrecords of their vessels as pride of onwership and a source of wealth’.From Medieval to Regency –Old Masters in the Collection of the Ferens Art GalleryThe painting ‘Westerdale’s yard and the ‘Wellington’ from the New Dock’ is inthis tradition. In 1794 Robert Willoughby was recorded as a house and shippainter in High Street, Hull. Willoughby lived at Castle Row, Hull and lad a shopat 10, Savile Street, Hull in 1810. He is one of the earliest Hull marine painterswhose body of work, although small, is easily recognisable. All the survivingpictures have a strong sense of identity as if they were painted as atopographical record, rather than with any artistic intent. In this painting, agentleman welcomes a group of ladies aboard his splendid ship. There aremany other details of interest in the picture such as the row of bollards andchains to safeguard people from falling into the water at night. visible behindthe figures are the stockpiles of wood used in the construction of the shipsand on the extreme left is the tower of the church of St John, built in 1791-92,and demolished in the 1920s to make way for the Ferens Art Gallery.Colchester artist Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures. Chris specialises in making sculptures out of unusual materials, particularly vehicles that are made out of reclaimed items. One such example of his work is a tank made out of lawnmowers and wheelbarrows and is decorated in fifty paintings by John Constable. "The tank is made out of lawnmowers and wheelbarrows and is decorated in fifty paintings by John Constable." The tank has formed part of an exhibition that he has taken across the country and to the Edinburgh Festival. It has even been featured on BBC 2's 'The Culture Show'. But now Chris faces the problem of finding a new location to store his tank. Previously, they were stored by his friends, but they now need the space back. Should he not be able to find a new home for the sculpture, it will have to be destroyed. He's looking for a gallery or museum who may be interested in taking the tank, which is approximately the size of a Mini, or someone who does have the space to house his collection. The BBC Essex Helpline spoke to Chris Dobrowolski about his plight. Click on the link below to hear more Cart My Account My Gallery Track Order Search over 500,000 prints: advanced searchSubjects | Artists | Collections | Best Sellers Find this artist in Animals Scenic Art Styles Fine Art Decorative Art Vintage Art Photography Subjects Scenic Botanical Places People Abstract Animals World Culture Music Sports Architecture Transporation Movies Cuisine Motivational Children more... 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Chris Dobrowolski 51 x 61 cm Photographic Print(1 other size available) £ 25.99 Usually ships in: 3-5 Days detailsWonders of Creation - Wha... Chris Dobrowolski 51 x 61 cm Giclee Print(2 other sizes available) £ 31.99 Usually ships in: 3-5 Days detailsWonders of Creation - Dol... Chris Dobrowolski 51 x 61 cm Giclee Print(2 other sizes available) £ 31.99 Usually ships in: 3-5 Days Page 1 of 212Next > Display: 12 items per page30 items per page48 items per page 100% Satisfaction 30-day Return Policy We are committed to quality products and your satisfaction > Fast Shipping Delivers in Days Fast delivery from our European warehouse Art Pad Express Yourself Doodle with our fun drawing tool > Business Sales Trade Discounts Join our business & trade program > exclusive offers and updatesPlease enter a valid address About Us | Careers | Affiliates | Artist Rising | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Contact Us | Help Order By Phone:.Jump to navigation WRITTEN CONTRIBUTIONS 'Chris Dobrowolski’s solitary way: Get out while you can' David Thomson Essex landscape artist Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured topographies-his reconfiguration of topography itself. The question of transcendence and landscape could be posed as a kind of hedge fun management question (Dobrowolski loves to play with the lingo of the corporate and financial world). If you're trying to take off in an experimental aircraft in which thirteen pilots in a similar situation have been killed, and there is a short wall of tight, interwoven trees in front of you, do you hedge your bets and bail out, or do you give it more juice and see what happens in the sky? That Dobrowolski is willing to try such capers-opting variously for literal hedge and literal sky-merely means that he has the kind of gross physical courage for which young men in war get medals. Of far greater interest is the fact that Dobrowolksi's courage infuses his aesthetic. I've waited a long time for this. Beauty can be brave. Dobrowolski's scapes-landscapes, mindscapes, escapes-are delicately rendered, lovely and complex and gorgeous. The vision here is Miltonic, a coupling of luciferian luster with the industrial sublime, every pipe and buckle and sulfurous engine precisely right. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Dobrowolski can do it all, abstract, mimetic, the whole shebang. He's scoured the modern era, and taken what he needs, 'ransacking the center,' Milton might say, 'with impious hands.' Dobrowolski both embodies the age and rises above it. His own valuation of the work should be noted but, in the main, discounted. While his work maintains the creative tension between event and artifact and hectors the participant-observer into the kind of Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole space-time freakout where a diorama might feel as large as the county of Humberside, Dobrowolski is content to laugh as if such conjunctions were merely escapade. Landscape picaresque. He told me he'd made an old car you could pedal and had some funny adventures with the police, and I imagined a hodgepodge. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The car is many things-an evocation of a particular landscape, a portion of a master raconteur's tale, a museum piece, an ongoing vehicle for transcendence-but let's be sure to bring the literalists on board here: those bits of pipe and rubber are pretty. I took the kids to feel/see/hear Dobrowolski perform the other night in a converted church space on top of one of the few hills in Essex, near a pile of stone which turned out to be the oldest Roman arch in England, in the city of Colchester, which had had its heyday a couple of millennia earlier. Dobrowolski organized one version of his material as a linear progression, a sort of bildungsroman whereby the artist comes of age in a complex struggle to build a conveyance suitable to the integrity of his quest-to escape from art college. And not just any art college, but the one constructed on the same Hull pier from which Robinson Crusoe had sailed centuries earlier. The real Robinson Crusoe. I don't take the word of artists about their work and haven't done, not since the day when, say, I realized that Homer seemed to have covered up Odysseus's lies about his sailing adventures. But of course Dobrowolski is both Odysseus and Homer, and the glory is in the telling. Dobrowolski did escape from art college, over and over, in works of art and artifice from his own hands: a sailboat, a car, a hovercraft, a tank, an airplane, all of it from bits of flotsam found in the detritus of a life lived on the edge. And what stands out about all this art is how real it is, in every sense. Real sailboat, real car, real hovercraft. It's not far from real tank and real airplane to real life, and who will bridge the gap for us if not Dobrowolski? Dobrowolski collects and masters genre-Zapruderesque documentary, airplane hydraulics, poetry, drama, welding, comedy, landscape painting-the way some people pick up seashells. His refurbishings alone suggest multiple skill sets. Is there anything Dobrowolski can't do? Watching Dobrowolski in action, I thought about the great escape artists of the modern era. Elvis Presley and Walter Benjamin, who almost got out (the latter made it to the Spanish border before he hung himself). Houdini-so far so good. Slavomir Rawicz, whose The Long Walk maintains its cult credentials even today and reminds us of the intertwining of event and event-production. That book, too, considers the notion, which works well either as fiction or fact, that Poles are the toughest people on the planet. Certainly Dobrowolski's oeuvre is a love poem to his irascible dad, the Polish soldier and ex-landowner, and breaking out of childhood-self-creation-is probably the most fraught of human experiences. If I insist upon Dowbrowolski's triumph as a landscape artist, here in Constable country, it is not to limit the UK artist's palate but merely to appropriate it for my own work on the Essex sublime. Can we have travel without destination? Destination has degraded travel writing to a series of predictable remarks upon the noteworthiness of landscape objects. No one visits Essex, anymore than they would the Humberside of Dowbrowolski's pilgrimages. Essex is what you escape from. But that's not enough. If it's the sublime you want-and, God help me, I do-then you must escape over and over. To get to the sublime, to the transcendent, then follow Dowbrowolski's trajectory, his flight path. And that means breaking out over and over. Once is never enough. Essex for me is both a writing project and an American's experience of landscape, and Dowbrowolski has surely, for anyone who walks or writes or sees, vastly increased the canon of worthy sight lines. Can you escape from Essex? Yes, repeatedly. If you clear your palate enough, you can taste the sublime. What better place than the great muddy eastern fringes of Milton's island? Chris Dobrowolski is back in Essex for a while. East of England, east of Eden. As the Puritan poet said of Adam and Eve when they left the pretty garden and set to work: the world was all before them. Copyright © David Thomson David Thomson teaches graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Toronto. He has lived in Essex for two years, and is writing a book on Essex landscape entitled 'View from a Kettle.' Jump to main navigation bar Look at other sections: please select... Events Families Young People Courses, Conferences & Talks Events for People with Disabilities Community Programmes Adult Learning Resources Things To Do ADULT LEARNING RESOURCES Creative Writing in Museums Memory Maps What are Memory Maps? Contemporary Writing on Essex Essex Trails Essex & Suffolk Paintings & Drawings Essex objects Historical Writing about Essex Essex University Creative Writing Course How to Get Involved Written contributions 1939 Memories of Walton on the Naze On Southend Pier Barking Creek Cities of the Universe Cold nostalgia of the air shaft Luke Howard's Constable Chris Dobrowolski’s Solitary Way Writers and Books connected with Essex Weblinks to Museums in Essex, Suffolk & Middlesex English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Trails & Kits for Adults Jump to search Home Your Visit Exhibitions Collections Research & Conservation Activities & Events Schools & Students Support Us Shop Online Jump to breadcrumb What's On Sitemap Search: Jump to footer You are here: Home > Activities & Events > Adult Learning Resources > Memory Maps > Written contributions > Chris Dobrowolski’s Solitary Way Email In a great deal of his previous work, Chris Dobrowolski has been dealing with history. Household appliances, often themselves junk-shop antiques, have been side-tracked, perverted into memory-machines. A fridge stands with a gutted tv on top of it, connected by extractor-fan tubing. Open the fridge door (of course it’s empty) and the tv spurts into life. Literally. Inside the screen a snowstorm envelops the toytown figures, while, dimly heard on the lowest-fi vinyl, military music plays Soviet marching songs. Through a sleight of hand, familiar objects are lightly, playfully transformed, and the mini-drama that results is one that keeps its charm despite the looming presence of its connotations: a melancholy deeply undercut by menace.In his present show at studio1.1 the mood has switched focus. Inside a series of wall-mounted crates there are similar settings, the same mannikins in the same painted scenery, but the sinister aspect has been twisted directly back on itself. The toys that jolt into life, the machines with a will of their own, are targeting the art market they exist inside.To know how it feels to be yelled at by the driver of a Matchbox car, be the butt of an artist 2cm tall desperate to offload his paintings, In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Chris Dobrowolski has created a series of temperamental vehicles to run away in. His journeys in these ‘knocked up in my garden shed’ machines have become a right of passage and the beginnings of countless stories. Recorded on super 8 film, Chris combines these fragile documentations with slides, music and monologue, creating a performance that is both funny and touching http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The works of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski are featured at ImageKind.com, an online art community for selling originals, limited edition prints, posters and other art.In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built elaborate and ingenious ways to escape! http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Essex landscape artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The exhibition of new works by Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculpture http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Colchester artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters. Find Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters at Art.com http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built this tank using teachests covered with Constable prints, old brooms, letterboxes and various other recycled materials http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris, a gangly beanpole of a man with a Worzel Gummidge mop of sandy hair, .... and consists of one man, artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk In a great deal of his previous work, Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has been dealing with history. Household appliances, often http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk themselves junk-shop antiques http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk
ChrisDobrowolski.co.uk
http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The works of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski are featured at ImageKind.com, an online art community for selling originals, limited edition prints, posters and other art.In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built elaborate and ingenious ways to escape! http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Essex landscape artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The exhibition of new works by Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculpture http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Colchester artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters. Find Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters at Art.com http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built this tank using teachests covered with Constable prints, old brooms, letterboxes and various other recycled materials http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris, a gangly beanpole of a man with a Worzel Gummidge mop of sandy hair, .... and consists of one man, artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk In a great deal of his previous work, Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has been dealing with history. Household appliances, often http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk themselves junk-shop antiques http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk A B O U T T H E A R T I S T I've loved drawing since I was a kid. I earned my first commission in second grade,earning a penny for drawing Charlie Brown for a classmate. I graduated high school in 1980,the year of "stagflation." Rather than enter art school, I did the sensible thing and went to engineering school. That would have been great, if I had any interest in engineering. After working for two weeks as an engineer, I quit. I decided to change careers and enter the world of advertising art. It was a difficult transition. I paid my dues working in darkrooms (remember those?) before finally getting a job with a small agency.Over the years I've created advertising art for a variety of companies, including Foxwoods, Carnival Cruise Lines, Boston Market, Papa Gino's, Newport Creamery, Abbott Laboratories, and Holmes Products. But I've come to the point in my life where I want to create my own art. I'm currently in the middle of creating what I hope will be dozens of realistic wildlife illustrations. I'm very pleased with the way things are progressing. I plan on doing several illustrations in each animal series. After that, I may do some religious art. My Catholic faith is central to my life, and I hope that all of my art glorifies God in some way.©2008 Chris Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s solitary way: Get out while you can' David Thomson Essex landscape artist Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured topographies-his reconfiguration of topography itself. The question of transcendence and landscape could be posed as a kind of hedge fun management question (Dobrowolski loves to play with the lingo of the corporate and financial world). If you're trying to take off in an experimental aircraft in which thirteen pilots in a similar situation have been killed, and there is a short wall of tight, interwoven trees in front of you, do you hedge your bets and bail out, or do you give it more juice and see what happens in the sky? That Dobrowolski is willing to try such capers-opting variously for literal hedge and literal sky-merely means that he has the kind of gross physical courage for which young men in war get medals. Of far greater interest is the fact that Dobrowolksi's courage infuses his aesthetic. I've waited a long time for this. Beauty can be brave. Dobrowolski's scapes-landscapes, mindscapes, escapes-are delicately rendered, lovely and complex and gorgeous. The vision here is Miltonic, a coupling of luciferian luster with the industrial sublime, every pipe and buckle and sulfurous engine precisely right. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Dobrowolski can do it all, abstract, mimetic, the whole shebang. He's scoured the modern era, and taken what he needs, 'ransacking the center,' Milton might say, 'with impious hands.' Dobrowolski both embodies the age and rises above it. His own valuation of the work should be noted but, in the main, discounted. While his work maintains the creative tension between event and artifact and hectors the participant-observer into the kind of Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole space-time freakout where a diorama might feel as large as the county of Humberside, Dobrowolski is content to laugh as if such conjunctions were merely escapade. Landscape picaresque. He told me he'd made an old car you could pedal and had some funny adventures with the police, and I imagined a hodgepodge. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The car is many things-an evocation of a particular landscape, a portion of a master raconteur's tale, a museum piece, an ongoing vehicle for transcendence-but let's be sure to bring the literalists on board here: those bits of pipe and rubber are pretty. I took the kids to feel/see/hear Dobrowolski perform the other night in a converted church space on top of one of the few hills in Essex, near a pile of stone which turned out to be the oldest Roman arch in England, in the city of Colchester, which had had its heyday a couple of millennia earlier. Dobrowolski organized one version of his material as a linear progression, a sort of bildungsroman whereby the artist comes of age in a complex struggle to build a conveyance suitable to the integrity of his quest-to escape from art college. And not just any art college, but the one constructed on the same Hull pier from which Robinson Crusoe had sailed centuries earlier. The real Robinson Crusoe. I don't take the word of artists about their work and haven't done, not since the day when, say, I realized that Homer seemed to have covered up Odysseus's lies about his sailing adventures. But of course Dobrowolski is both Odysseus and Homer, and the glory is in the telling. Dobrowolski did escape from art college, over and over, in works of art and artifice from his own hands: a sailboat, a car, a hovercraft, a tank, an airplane, all of it from bits of flotsam found in the detritus of a life lived on the edge. And what stands out about all this art is how real it is, in every sense. Real sailboat, real car, real hovercraft. It's not far from real tank and real airplane to real life, and who will bridge the gap for us if not Dobrowolski? Dobrowolski collects and masters genre-Zapruderesque documentary, airplane hydraulics, poetry, drama, welding, comedy, landscape painting-the way some people pick up seashells. His refurbishings alone suggest multiple skill sets. Is there anything Dobrowolski can't do? Watching Dobrowolski in action, I thought about the great escape artists of the modern era. Elvis Presley and Walter Benjamin, who almost got out (the latter made it to the Spanish border before he hung himself). Houdini-so far so good. Slavomir Rawicz, whose The Long Walk maintains its cult credentials even today and reminds us of the intertwining of event and event-production. That book, too, considers the notion, which works well either as fiction or fact, that Poles are the toughest people on the planet. Certainly Dobrowolski's oeuvre is a love poem to his irascible dad, the Polish soldier and ex-landowner, and breaking out of childhood-self-creation-is probably the most fraught of human experiences. If I insist upon Dowbrowolski's triumph as a landscape artist, here in Constable country, it is not to limit the UK artist's palate but merely to appropriate it for my own work on the Essex sublime. Can we have travel without destination? Destination has degraded travel writing to a series of predictable remarks upon the noteworthiness of landscape objects. No one visits Essex, anymore than they would the Humberside of Dowbrowolski's pilgrimages. Essex is what you escape from. But that's not enough. If it's the sublime you want-and, God help me, I do-then you must escape over and over. To get to the sublime, to the transcendent, then follow Dowbrowolski's trajectory, his flight path. And that means breaking out over and over. Once is never enough. Essex for me is both a writing project and an American's experience of landscape, and Dowbrowolski has surely, for anyone who walks or writes or sees, vastly increased the canon of worthy sight lines. Can you escape from Essex? Yes, repeatedly. If you clear your palate enough, you can taste the sublime. What better place than the great muddy eastern fringes of Milton's island? Chris Dobrowolski is back in Essex for a while. East of England, east of Eden. As the Puritan poet said of Adam and Eve when they left the pretty garden and set to work: the world was all before them. Copyright © David Thomson David Thomson teaches graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Toronto. He has lived in Essex for two years, and is writing a book on Essex landscape entitled 'View from a Kettle.' Jump to main navigation bar Look at other sections: please select... Events Families Young People Courses, Conferences & Talks Events for People with Disabilities Community Programmes Adult Learning Resources Things To Do ADULT LEARNING RESOURCES Creative Writing in Museums Memory Maps What are Memory Maps? Contemporary Writing on Essex Essex Trails Essex & Suffolk Paintings & Drawings Essex objects Historical Writing about Essex Essex University Creative Writing Course How to Get Involved Written contributions 1939 Memories of Walton on the Naze On Southend Pier Barking Creek Cities of the Universe Cold nostalgia of the air shaft Luke Howard's Constable Chris Dobrowolski’s Solitary Way Writers and Books connected with Essex Weblinks to Museums in Essex, Suffolk & Middlesex English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Trails & Kits for Adults Jump to search Home Your Visit Exhibitions Collections Research & Conservation Activities & Events Schools & Students Support Us Shop Online Jump to breadcrumb What's On Sitemap Search: Jump to footer You are here: Home > Activities & Events > Adult Learning Resources > Memory Maps > Written contributions > Chris Dobrowolski’s 9 January 2006 Commercialisation of art the focus of new University exhibition A new exhibition at the University of Essex Gallery will investigate commercialism in the art world through a range of intriguing pieces including a modified Scalextric track. The exhibition of new works by Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks. Each work in the exhibition, which opens on Monday 16 January, concentrates on an aspect of promoting and marketing art. All the works incorporate a painted landscape background and the centre-piece will be a toy van, which will circle the Gallery on a Scalextric track, inviting us to 'buy my paintings' from a loudspeaker. Since his days as a student at Humberside University and the Royal College of Art, Dobrowolski has been uncomfortable about the art market. He explained: 'To justify its position at the top of our cultural hierarchy, fine art takes on the holier than thou stance of being good for you. It is supposed to have intellectual or philosophical aspirations and is not meant to be mere entertainment, decoration or a status symbol. 'I, like many artists, have a problem when it comes to promoting and selling work as this commercialisation always seems to denigrate the art to being just a commodity or ornament. With these hang-ups it is probably no coincidence that, financially, I am a very unsuccessful artist.' Dobrowolski is best-known for his large-scale artistic inventions which have included a fully-functioning hovercraft made out of plastic bottles washed up on the banks of the River Humber, a tank made from reproductions of Constable paintings, and an aeroplane. The exhibition by Chris Dobrowolski will be at the University of Essex Gallery in Wivenhoe Park, Colchester from 16 January to 11 February. Admission is free and opening times are as follows: Monday to Friday 11am-5pm and Saturday 1pm-4.30pm. Chris will also give a performance of his live art lecture on 25 January at 8pm at the Colchester Arts Centre. Tickets for this event cost £6 (£3.50 for concessions) and are available by telephoning 01206 500900. Notes to editors: For further information and/or images of works from the exhibition, please contact either Jessica Kenny, Gallery Director on 01206 872074, or e-mail kennj@essex.ac.uk, or Kate Clayton in the Public Relations Office on 01206 873529, or e-mail proffice@essex.ac.uk. Chris Dobrowolski will be on campus between Tuesday 10 and Friday 13 January. If you would like to arrange either an interview or photo opportunity please contact Jessica Kenny or Kate Clayton using the contact details above.Contacts Media enquiries at the University of Essex Public Relations Office, telephone +44 1206 872400, e-mail proffice@essex.ac.uk An online form to request press releases from the University. More news releases ~ University of Essex home page Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom. © Copyright 1999, 2006 University of Essex. All rights reserved. Page last modified by the Web Support Unit, 17 January 2006. Page 1 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsHull Through the Eyes of a SculptorIntroductionChris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range ofopportunities to investigate contemporary sculpture, local history and publicart, and in particular to investigate how ideas and meanings can becommunicated through three dimensional form.This resource has been designed to support a visit to the Ferens Art Gallerysculpture collection, by allowing pupils to investigate a particular work indetail, either before or after their visit. It is also designed, by following aspectsof the commissioning and artist’s working process, to support in particular unit9c of the Art and Design curriculum.Curriculum LinksThis learning journey can be used as a resource for:KS3 Art and design:• Unit 8C – Shared View• Unit 9C – Personal Spaces, Public PlacesInspiring Learning for All:• Knowledge Skills and Understanding• Activity, Behaviour and Progression• Enjoyment, Inspiration and Creativity• Attitudes and ValuesAbout the ArtistChris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculptureat the Royal College of Art from 1994 to 1996. He has described his earlierwork as being a personal exploration of landscape, seascape, skyscape andescape. Page 2 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museums‘I draw inspiration from the integrity of things that come about from peopletinkering around in their garden shed or garage. The end result of this ‘tinkering’often speaks volumes even when the maker might not consider themselves anartist. I am one of the last of that post war generation who, as a child, used tomake pram wheeled go-carts in the garden shed. With my art I try to capture thatelusive state of mind experienced when working without the ulterior motives thatmaking ‘Art’ imposes upon me’Chris Dobrowolski 1998Amongst the work he created during his time in Hull was a home-made boatmade from recycled materials. His maiden voyage on the Humber attractedthe attention of both the media and the Humber coastguards. The latterensured his safe return to shore.The CommissionHull as a major port city has always attracted artists who were interested in amaritime theme. The collections and displays of many of Hull’s museumsreflect not only Hull’s maritime history, but also the part played by artists inrecording and drawing inspiration from this industry.There are many ways to ‘capture’ or ‘reflect’ this heritage so in 1998 a newwork was commissioned from Chris Dobrowolski for the exhibition ‘All at Sea’.The exhibition was to focus on a maritime them from the 17thcentury to thepresent day. The gallery curator had liked Chris’ work which was relevant tothis theme and thought that a new piece from him would be a good elementof the exhibition. It would also add a new contemporary sculpture to thegallery’s permanent collection from an artist who had chosen to study andwork in Hull, like many other artists before him.The DrawingsThe drawings on this page are an exciting insight into the artists workingprocess. They show how the artist moves through a process of developingideas, thinking about what he would like to communicate with his work,rejecting a variety of ideas before coming to a final conclusion.Notice in drawing 1 how Dobrowolski sketches out his starting points in asimple bullet point list, and uses very quick drawings to illustrate, in this case to Page 3 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsthe curator, how he has already begun to make, but reject. This easily reflectsthe ‘tinkering’ process.In drawing 2 the artist begins to ‘deconstruct’ or ‘dissect’ the components ofa seascape dividing them into things that you can see (‘The Sky’, ‘The Sea’)and things which are not depicted as such (‘Beneath the Sea’). He alsocomments on his lack of maritime knowledge, with a lovely metaphor of an‘imaginary seadog sitting on my shoulder’In drawing 4 you can see Dobrowolski clearly thinking through the symbolismof his found materials. Tin cases ‘say’ something very different from‘something more utilitarian’.Drawing 5 shows the final sculpture, annotated to clarify his intentions.Another interesting part of this last drawing is his inclusion of ten records herejected.The Sculpture‘Siren’ is a sculpture constructed from a collection of trunks, ship parts and anold record player which features the 1955 hit single ‘Stowaway’ by BarbaraLyon. From this collection of simple and recycled objects, Dobrowolski hascreated a particularly poetic work of art dealing with the maritime theme. Thetitle ‘Siren’ asks us to think about Homers Odyssey, and the adventures ofOdysseus. We begin then to think about the female singer whose songattracts us to engage with the sculpture. Are we to imagine packing thesetrunks to seek our fortune? Where might the next ship leaving port take us?Are we to be shipwrecked? Or, if we begin to think about who did in factpack these trunks; what became of them? how many stories does Hull haveto tell as a major port?this is what makes Chris Dobrowlski’s sculpture such a successful work; it startsmaking us think on many levels without offering simple answers. We are leftwondering the answers to many of our questions; as we are also leftwondering about the many ‘old seadog’ tales which remain untold. Page 4 Hull Museum Educationwww.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsSiren in the words of the artist‘Here’s a run down on how it works technically. Looking through theporthole in the bottom of the top box you can see right down to floor level as I’ve cut through the other boxes.Mounted on the inside is a movement censor (the kind that trigger securitylights in the dark). the action of looking through the porthole turns on alamp and an old record player at the bottom of the piece. On the recordplayer is an old 78 by a singer called ‘Barbara Lyon’ called ‘Stowaway’. thismusic comes up and out of the cowl vent mounted on the top of thebottom box.The whole thing dismantles easily into three pieces and the record playercan be removed should it ever need to be fixed. I even managed to find acopy of the record should anything happen to the original. Having saidthat there isn’t a lot to go wrong with it as making it aesthetically simple hasmade it practical as well. It stands about 4 foot high a the lip of the openbox.’Chris Dobrowolski (March 1998)SirensChris has chosen a title which can be read in a number of ways. A siren, canbe‘a device that emits a loud prolonged signal or warning sound’The Concise Oxford English Dictionary.Sirens were also figures of ancient Greek mythology:‘sea nymphs with the head of a woman and the body of a bird who luredsailors to their doom by their songs.’Halls Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art.The most well know story is that of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseusencounters the Sirens. Odysseus orders his sailors to fill their ears with wax toavoid hearing their deadly song. He meanwhile is tied to the mast of his ship,so he can hear but resist their songs. Page 5 Hull Museum Education www.hullcc.gov.uk/museumsScenes from mythology have always been popular with artists and the Ferenshas another work with this subject, a large oil painting called ‘Ulysses and theSirens’ by Herbert Draper. There are several versions of this work including oneat Leeds City Art Gallery.Stow-a-wayStowaway was the song chosen by Chris from a range of potential records.He notes his rejects on drawing no. 5. It was a top ten hit in 1955 for the singerBarbara Lyon. The lyrics below show how the song adds another dimension tothis interesting sculpture:I’d like to go away – be a stowawaytake a trip on a ship,let my worries blow a-wayThere are still many treasure islandsthat wait to be explored,and the wide worldis full of wonders for me.When a ship’s standing in the harbour,I wish myself aboardand I hide ‘til the rolling tidecarries me to sea.Then I go sailing far off to Zanzibar,Though my dream places seembetter than they really are,‘way down deep in my heartI keep them as people will often do,who are stay at home stow aways too.I’d like to too.Lyric by Carolyn Leigh Page 6 Hull Museum Education http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.ukhttp://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk museumsWesterdale Yard – Robert WilloughbyMany maritime artists came from a background as sign painters or frompainting ships timbers. They were almost always local figures, who focussed onships easily accessible to them, and were patronised by local owners.‘All the artists were in the thrall of the local ship owners who wantedrecords of their vessels as pride of onwership and a source of wealth’.From Medieval to Regency –Old Masters in the Collection of the Ferens Art GalleryThe painting ‘Westerdale’s yard and the ‘Wellington’ from the New Dock’ is inthis tradition. In 1794 Robert Willoughby was recorded as a house and shippainter in High Street, Hull. Willoughby lived at Castle Row, Hull and lad a shopat 10, Savile Street, Hull in 1810. He is one of the earliest Hull marine painterswhose body of work, although small, is easily recognisable. All the survivingpictures have a strong sense of identity as if they were painted as atopographical record, rather than with any artistic intent. In this painting, agentleman welcomes a group of ladies aboard his splendid ship. There aremany other details of interest in the picture such as the row of bollards andchains to safeguard people from falling into the water at night. visible behindthe figures are the stockpiles of wood used in the construction of the shipsand on the extreme left is the tower of the church of St John, built in 1791-92,and demolished in the 1920s to make way for the Ferens Art Gallery.Colchester artist Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures. Chris specialises in making sculptures out of unusual materials, particularly vehicles that are made out of reclaimed items. One such example of his work is a tank made out of lawnmowers and wheelbarrows and is decorated in fifty paintings by John Constable. "The tank is made out of lawnmowers and wheelbarrows and is decorated in fifty paintings by John Constable." The tank has formed part of an exhibition that he has taken across the country and to the Edinburgh Festival. It has even been featured on BBC 2's 'The Culture Show'. But now Chris faces the problem of finding a new location to store his tank. Previously, they were stored by his friends, but they now need the space back. Should he not be able to find a new home for the sculpture, it will have to be destroyed. He's looking for a gallery or museum who may be interested in taking the tank, which is approximately the size of a Mini, or someone who does have the space to house his collection. The BBC Essex Helpline spoke to Chris Dobrowolski about his plight. Click on the link below to hear more Cart My Account My Gallery Track Order Search over 500,000 prints: advanced searchSubjects | Artists | Collections | Best Sellers Find this artist in Animals Scenic Art Styles Fine Art Decorative Art Vintage Art Photography Subjects Scenic Botanical Places People Abstract Animals World Culture Music Sports Architecture Transporation Movies Cuisine Motivational Children more... 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Chris Dobrowolski 51 x 61 cm Photographic Print(1 other size available) £ 25.99 Usually ships in: 3-5 Days detailsWonders of Creation - Wha... Chris Dobrowolski 51 x 61 cm Giclee Print(2 other sizes available) £ 31.99 Usually ships in: 3-5 Days detailsWonders of Creation - Dol... Chris Dobrowolski 51 x 61 cm Giclee Print(2 other sizes available) £ 31.99 Usually ships in: 3-5 Days Page 1 of 212Next > Display: 12 items per page30 items per page48 items per page 100% Satisfaction 30-day Return Policy We are committed to quality products and your satisfaction > Fast Shipping Delivers in Days Fast delivery from our European warehouse Art Pad Express Yourself Doodle with our fun drawing tool > Business Sales Trade Discounts Join our business & trade program > exclusive offers and updatesPlease enter a valid address About Us | Careers | Affiliates | Artist Rising | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Contact Us | Help Order By Phone:.Jump to navigation WRITTEN CONTRIBUTIONS 'Chris Dobrowolski’s solitary way: Get out while you can' David Thomson Essex landscape artist Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured topographies-his reconfiguration of topography itself. The question of transcendence and landscape could be posed as a kind of hedge fun management question (Dobrowolski loves to play with the lingo of the corporate and financial world). If you're trying to take off in an experimental aircraft in which thirteen pilots in a similar situation have been killed, and there is a short wall of tight, interwoven trees in front of you, do you hedge your bets and bail out, or do you give it more juice and see what happens in the sky? That Dobrowolski is willing to try such capers-opting variously for literal hedge and literal sky-merely means that he has the kind of gross physical courage for which young men in war get medals. Of far greater interest is the fact that Dobrowolksi's courage infuses his aesthetic. I've waited a long time for this. Beauty can be brave. Dobrowolski's scapes-landscapes, mindscapes, escapes-are delicately rendered, lovely and complex and gorgeous. The vision here is Miltonic, a coupling of luciferian luster with the industrial sublime, every pipe and buckle and sulfurous engine precisely right. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Dobrowolski can do it all, abstract, mimetic, the whole shebang. He's scoured the modern era, and taken what he needs, 'ransacking the center,' Milton might say, 'with impious hands.' Dobrowolski both embodies the age and rises above it. His own valuation of the work should be noted but, in the main, discounted. While his work maintains the creative tension between event and artifact and hectors the participant-observer into the kind of Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole space-time freakout where a diorama might feel as large as the county of Humberside, Dobrowolski is content to laugh as if such conjunctions were merely escapade. Landscape picaresque. He told me he'd made an old car you could pedal and had some funny adventures with the police, and I imagined a hodgepodge. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The car is many things-an evocation of a particular landscape, a portion of a master raconteur's tale, a museum piece, an ongoing vehicle for transcendence-but let's be sure to bring the literalists on board here: those bits of pipe and rubber are pretty. I took the kids to feel/see/hear Dobrowolski perform the other night in a converted church space on top of one of the few hills in Essex, near a pile of stone which turned out to be the oldest Roman arch in England, in the city of Colchester, which had had its heyday a couple of millennia earlier. Dobrowolski organized one version of his material as a linear progression, a sort of bildungsroman whereby the artist comes of age in a complex struggle to build a conveyance suitable to the integrity of his quest-to escape from art college. And not just any art college, but the one constructed on the same Hull pier from which Robinson Crusoe had sailed centuries earlier. The real Robinson Crusoe. I don't take the word of artists about their work and haven't done, not since the day when, say, I realized that Homer seemed to have covered up Odysseus's lies about his sailing adventures. But of course Dobrowolski is both Odysseus and Homer, and the glory is in the telling. Dobrowolski did escape from art college, over and over, in works of art and artifice from his own hands: a sailboat, a car, a hovercraft, a tank, an airplane, all of it from bits of flotsam found in the detritus of a life lived on the edge. And what stands out about all this art is how real it is, in every sense. Real sailboat, real car, real hovercraft. It's not far from real tank and real airplane to real life, and who will bridge the gap for us if not Dobrowolski? Dobrowolski collects and masters genre-Zapruderesque documentary, airplane hydraulics, poetry, drama, welding, comedy, landscape painting-the way some people pick up seashells. His refurbishings alone suggest multiple skill sets. Is there anything Dobrowolski can't do? Watching Dobrowolski in action, I thought about the great escape artists of the modern era. Elvis Presley and Walter Benjamin, who almost got out (the latter made it to the Spanish border before he hung himself). Houdini-so far so good. Slavomir Rawicz, whose The Long Walk maintains its cult credentials even today and reminds us of the intertwining of event and event-production. That book, too, considers the notion, which works well either as fiction or fact, that Poles are the toughest people on the planet. Certainly Dobrowolski's oeuvre is a love poem to his irascible dad, the Polish soldier and ex-landowner, and breaking out of childhood-self-creation-is probably the most fraught of human experiences. If I insist upon Dowbrowolski's triumph as a landscape artist, here in Constable country, it is not to limit the UK artist's palate but merely to appropriate it for my own work on the Essex sublime. Can we have travel without destination? Destination has degraded travel writing to a series of predictable remarks upon the noteworthiness of landscape objects. No one visits Essex, anymore than they would the Humberside of Dowbrowolski's pilgrimages. Essex is what you escape from. But that's not enough. If it's the sublime you want-and, God help me, I do-then you must escape over and over. To get to the sublime, to the transcendent, then follow Dowbrowolski's trajectory, his flight path. And that means breaking out over and over. Once is never enough. Essex for me is both a writing project and an American's experience of landscape, and Dowbrowolski has surely, for anyone who walks or writes or sees, vastly increased the canon of worthy sight lines. Can you escape from Essex? Yes, repeatedly. If you clear your palate enough, you can taste the sublime. What better place than the great muddy eastern fringes of Milton's island? Chris Dobrowolski is back in Essex for a while. East of England, east of Eden. As the Puritan poet said of Adam and Eve when they left the pretty garden and set to work: the world was all before them. Copyright © David Thomson David Thomson teaches graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Toronto. He has lived in Essex for two years, and is writing a book on Essex landscape entitled 'View from a Kettle.' Jump to main navigation bar Look at other sections: please select... Events Families Young People Courses, Conferences & Talks Events for People with Disabilities Community Programmes Adult Learning Resources Things To Do ADULT LEARNING RESOURCES Creative Writing in Museums Memory Maps What are Memory Maps? 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Household appliances, often themselves junk-shop antiques, have been side-tracked, perverted into memory-machines. A fridge stands with a gutted tv on top of it, connected by extractor-fan tubing. Open the fridge door (of course it’s empty) and the tv spurts into life. Literally. Inside the screen a snowstorm envelops the toytown figures, while, dimly heard on the lowest-fi vinyl, military music plays Soviet marching songs. Through a sleight of hand, familiar objects are lightly, playfully transformed, and the mini-drama that results is one that keeps its charm despite the looming presence of its connotations: a melancholy deeply undercut by menace.In his present show at studio1.1 the mood has switched focus. Inside a series of wall-mounted crates there are similar settings, the same mannikins in the same painted scenery, but the sinister aspect has been twisted directly back on itself. The toys that jolt into life, the machines with a will of their own, are targeting the art market they exist inside.To know how it feels to be yelled at by the driver of a Matchbox car, be the butt of an artist 2cm tall desperate to offload his paintings, In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Chris Dobrowolski has created a series of temperamental vehicles to run away in. His journeys in these ‘knocked up in my garden shed’ machines have become a right of passage and the beginnings of countless stories. Recorded on super 8 film, Chris combines these fragile documentations with slides, music and monologue, creating a performance that is both funny and touching http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The works of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski are featured at ImageKind.com, an online art community for selling originals, limited edition prints, posters and other art.In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built elaborate and ingenious ways to escape! http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Essex landscape artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The exhibition of new works by Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculpture http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Colchester artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters. Find Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters at Art.com http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built this tank using teachests covered with Constable prints, old brooms, letterboxes and various other recycled materials http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris, a gangly beanpole of a man with a Worzel Gummidge mop of sandy hair, .... and consists of one man, artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk In a great deal of his previous work, Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has been dealing with history. Household appliances, often http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk themselves junk-shop antiques http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk
http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The works of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski are featured at ImageKind.com, an online art community for selling originals, limited edition prints, posters and other art.In an attempt to escape his dissatisfaction with art school and the art world, sculptor Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built elaborate and ingenious ways to escape! http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Essex landscape artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has raised the bar on transcendence. Things can hardly be the same now, given Dobrowolski's reconfigured http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk The exhibition of new works by Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski, who has exhibited across Europe, addresses the artist's own reservations about the selling of his artworks http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski’s sculpture ‘Siren’ offers pupils a whole range of Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski studied Fine Art in Hull from 1988 to 1991 and then Sculpture http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Colchester artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski is facing a bit of a problem. He can't find a home for one of his most successful sculptures http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters. Find Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski Prints and Posters at Art.com http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski built this tank using teachests covered with Constable prints, old brooms, letterboxes and various other recycled materials http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk Christopher Dobrowolski Chris, a gangly beanpole of a man with a Worzel Gummidge mop of sandy hair, .... and consists of one man, artist Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk In a great deal of his previous work, Christopher Dobrowolski Chris Dobrowolski has been dealing with history. Household appliances, often http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk themselves junk-shop antiques http://www.chrisdobrowolski.co.uk In 1999 Sculpture in the Park featured the wonderful creativity of Christopher Dobrowolski. This newly commissioned piece was a progression of Chris’ earlier works such as Landscape Escape (1993) which was shown in Uses of an Artist: Constable in Constable Country Now. These works have a certain quality that both involves and encompasses the landscape. With Aerial Chris used the changing undulations in the landscape of the park by following its traversing lines with a cable piece. Suspended from these cables was solar powered radios, the rotating cables enabled these to pass through the landscape by means of a windmill. This fascinating piece combined the elements of wind and sun to send solar powered radios moving across the landscape. Chris said:“This piece is a progression from my earlier work in which I have worked within landscape in a solitary/personal way. E.g. Tank, hovercraft, boat, car, aeroplane. With the cable piece I intend to use the park by following its changing landscape with the traversing line and bringing in the elements of wind, sun and radio.” “The initial power source at one end of the ‘cable car’ is a windmill mounted on a telegraph pole. With this as a starting point I intend to connect with trees and other poles where necessary therefore visually rhyming for as far as the power given will allow. The radios would then make another connection with anyone in the path of the line as it goes past.” The exhibition was a unique opportunity to explore the visual aesthetics of resistance. Taking in work that mixes up art, music and design, artists from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Finland and the UK, it provided a critical and often playful opposition to contemporary hyper-structured consumer culture. 'DaDaDa: Strategies against Marketecture' deals in appropriation & DIY revolution, craft & hi-tech collage through 2D, video, music and installation pieces that examine the relationship between present technologies and the more traditional cut and paste methods employed by ideologically motivated artists in the twentieth century, a movement from Mertz assemblages to current computer screen manipulations.As well as a live performance from Anat Ben-David on the opening night, the exhibition was accompanied by a fanzine format catalogue and a limited edition compilation CD of some of the most exciting bands emerging today alongside artists featured in the show.Artists: Anat Ben-David, Jessica Broas, Chicks on Speed, DAT Politics, Christopher Dobrowolski, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Mister Ministeck, Noriko Okaku, Erkki Rautio, ROR (Revolutions on Request), Hiraki Sawa, Hideyuki Sawayanagi, Dallas Seitz Highlights include Christopher Dobrowolski’s fantastic sculptures – push a button and a dismembered tape player comes to life with The Big Country theme, reeling analogue tape around telegraph poles in a miniature landscape. While ROR’s flaming PS1 handset and pixelated carpet patterns, possibly of a game-style explosion, have a humour that brings together seemingly disparate objects. Hideyuki Sawayanagi’s ingenious sound piece of builder-esque whistling can eventually be located emanating from a leftover coffee cup I particularly liked Christopher Dobrowolski's toy size landscapes with mutant cassette and turntable soundtracks and the 3D Jesus picture with a twist. Oh and watch out for the whistling cup!