This website is for my art and work related to aikido. All the art work is available for sale unless otherwise stated. Please don’t hesitate to contact me via the website or at scottallbright@yahoo.co.uk if you have any questions.

Artwork and Aikido

“It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword,

and he should have a taste for both Ways”

Miyamoto Musashi

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can”.

Frida Kahlo

Whether by ‘pen’ or by sword, the art of a warrior equips him or her with the tools to transform the punishing flurry of life into something ordered and aesthetic. Through these images the artist’s emotional order is re established through the process of making and thence communicating the personal trials and tribulations of his life, from the most mundane to the most tragic. Each, like a mosaic, pieces together the fragments of his experience into something beautiful and even comprehendible. At times the spectacle is simple: what you get is what you see. However most thankfully slow their message through their ability to throw us gently, almost imperceptibly into confusion by simultaneously being both manifest and mysterious: at times the painful truth presented and obscured by a keen intelligence and an artful sleight of hand. The strength, for example (coded in the bold use of colour, the terse title and the confident sculptural line) of many of the images, is emotionally and visually refracted by the unsettling vulnerability of the subject and the subject matter. At once they are both very public and very private, cryptic and confessional. Added to this, the lavish use of symbolism, again both everyday and extra-ordinary, brings a cerebral spin to the immediacy of their intense visceral thrill. They affect us by disrupting the equilibrium of both our senses and our own unexamined sense of security. Their force, first emotional, is then softened into curiosity and questions. As viewer we are fazed, often confused by the voyeuristic delight possible in their forms but whether or not we fathom their meaning we are left intrigued, captured and quizzical.

Callum Elliot (February 2021)

BA History of art and philosophy

BSc Psychology