Marc Quinn was born in London in 1964. He read History of Art at Cambridge University (1982-85) and began working as a sculptor in 1984. Often grouped with the YBAs or Young British Artists, Quinn is one of the most interesting and compelling artists working today. The work that brought him into the larger public consciousness was Self (1991), a cast of the artist’s head made from 4.5 litres of his own blood. Critical acclaim both at home and abroad has ensured that his work has been included in numerous exhibitions around the world. Shows such as the Sydney Biennale in 1992, Young British Artists II at the Saatchi Gallery in 1993 and Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997 helped to enhance his growing reputation.

In June 2001 Quinn won the Royal Academy's £25,000 Charles Wollaston prize for the most distinguished work in the summer exhibition. The National Portrait Gallery recently commissioned Quinn to produce a portrait of Sir John Sulston (former director of the Sanger Centre and a leading contributor to the Human Genome Project). Quinn took a sample of Sulston's DNA to make the portrait which is an exact representation of its subject.

if you have a stomach for it. Not surprisingly, it's also a runaway success.

In the exhibition, seven of the mutilated figures had already been sold at $125,000 each. The era of amputation chic has opened with a bang!

"The marble sculptures really are about how biology isn't destiny …. Marble is the classical material for heroes of ancient times and these people [i.e., the subjects of the portraits] are modern-day heroes because they have dealt with their bodies and inner worlds. Their free will has conquered biological destiny and so they become celebratory."

"The portrait contains a small fraction of my DNA, though there is ample information to identify me.

"I like that it makes the invisible visible, and brings the inside out. This is a portrait of our shared inheritance and communality, as well as of one person."

Self, a frozen sculpture of the artist's head made from 4.5 litres (9.5 US pints) of the artist's own frozen blood taken from his body over a period of five months, like many other pieces by the YBA's, was bought by Charles Saatchi (in 1991 for a reputed £13,000). The press reported in 2002 that the sculpture had been destroyed by builders employed to expand the kitchen for Saatchi's partner, the celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, when they unplugged the freezer in which it was being stored (it has to be kept at -12C/10F). This would seem to have been unfounded, however, as the piece was exhibited intact by Saatchi when he opened his new gallery in London in 2003. In April, 2005, self was sold to a US collector £1.5m.

Since then, Quinn has produced a diverse range of work,most of which is preoccupied with the ever-changing physical states of the body.
His next important piece in terms of public profile was the frozen garden he made for Miuccia Prada in the year 2000. A whole garden full of plants which could never grow together kept in cryogenic suspension, "Garden" seems to anticipate many of the environmental themes which have become so important in the last few years.

Quinn has also made a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in the 15 ton marble statue of Alison Lapper, a woman who was born with no arms and severely shortened legs, which sits on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London.

Increasingly his work addresses ideas concerning mortality and survival in our age. Marc Quinn’s sculptures, perhaps more than any others, have come to stand for the wilful sensitivity to the body and mortality that was fostered by British art in the 1990s.

His controversial work has been exhibited globally, with prestigious solo shows taking place in such institutions as London’s Tate Gallery and Italy’s Prada Foundation.

Marc Quinn's last sculpture transformed Alison Lapper - a woman lacking arms and fully developed legs - into a dramatic, powerful figure for Trafalgar Square. His new work, Sphinx, takes a woman of unearthly beauty and transforms her into a contorted figure with her ankles uncomfortably wrapped round her ears.

The work is Quinn's much anticipated sculpture of Kate Moss, seen here for the first time before going on view in the Netherlands this month.

"The two sculptures are really about the same thing: why we do, or do not, find a person beautiful," he said.

And no, Moss is not working up to an alternative career in extreme yoga. Though the body depicted is Moss's, and the hands and feet are life casts, another model was used to create the position. "I found a person who could do the yoga pose," said Quinn, "and we made a lot of drawings, photographs and measurements. Then Kate came into the studio. I'd done some life casts of her in the past, and we made more measurements and photos. From all that we sculpted Kate's body in the pose; this is her body and her proportions."

Quinn was drawn to Moss because of her ambiguous place in our culture: a creature who is admired and observed obsessively, but about whom we have little real knowledge.

"She is a contemporary version of the Sphinx. A mystery. There must be something about her that has clicked with the collective unconscious to make her so ubiquitous, so spirit of the age," Quinn said. "When people look back at this time she'll be the archetypal image, just as Louise Brooks was in the 1920s. For me as an artist it's interesting to make something about the time I live in."

This is not a personal portrait of Moss; the work makes no attempt to convey her inner life. "It's a portrait of an image, and the way that image is sculpted and twisted by our collective desire," Quinn said. "She is a mirror of ourselves, a knotted Venus of our age."

Alison Lapper Pregnant was a conscious counterpoint to the Venus de Milo. The latter, though once complete, is now instantly recognisable by its missing limbs. The Trafalgar Square sculpture is complete in itself.

Sphinx, on the other hand, appears to have more limbs than it really does - like a version, Quinn suggested, of the multi-limbed Hindu deity, Shiva. He also pointed to the Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön, the priest who, with his sons, was strangled by serpents for warning the Trojans about the Greeks' wooden horse. That statue, in the Vatican Museums, is a writhing mass of arms, legs, and thigh-thick snakes. He mentioned, too, the painting by Ingres in the National Gallery of Oedipus and the Sphinx, in which the mythical Greek figure confronts a half-woman, half-lion, and answers her riddle (what goes on four legs, three legs, two legs? - answer: man).

Moss - who has proved an irresistible model for artists including Lucian Freud - had no hesitation in being thus depicted. "She came round to the studio and looked at some drawings. She got it immediately and was really excited about it," he said.

The work is not carved from marble, like Alison Lapper Pregnant. It was cast in bronze and then painted white, creating a flat, blank surface. "Marble is too delicate, Quinn said.

"I wanted a screen, something totally neutral."

If anything, said Quinn, Moss's brushes with the law had only made her image more potent. "When she had those troubles there was a collision between her real life and the image. The two didn't fit, and it seemed unacceptable to people.

"Paradoxically, though, it's made her bigger and stronger because it has humanised her. It's a bit like going back to ancient marble sculpture.

 One of the reasons people like fragmented marble sculpture is that there's a sense of loss that makes it more human.

"Kate's body is perfect, but her problems with the press and drugs and so forth is her lost limb; the one imperfection that makes her more beautiful."

The sculpture is part of a planned series of works of Moss in yogic poses, to be first shown as a group in New York.

Quinn's next project is no less striking. Like many Buddha figures, Sphinx sits in the lotus position -- legs folded, back straight, stiff hands holding an invisible force -- but unlike your typical Buddha, Sphinx is anorexically thin. The skin is taut around serpentine veins and protruding ribs, vertebrae, vocal cords, and skeletal muscles, and the concave belly forms a deep bowl. She's a morbid deity, one on the verge of self-inflicted death, but the eyes (and, again, the kitty-cat smile) reveal a glimmer of defiance. Sphinx-Moss has transcended her emaciated anatomy and tabloid tormentors. Like the Buddha, she has found an inner peace.

Young British Artists or YBAs  also Brit artists and Britart  a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Mark Quinn Kate Moss painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

Mark Quinn Flower Close Up Painting on rolled canvas painted with artists acrylic paint. Hand painted copy.

30" x 40" canvas

R.R.P. £179.99

SALE Price £97

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How to stretch watercolour paper quickly and cheaply without tape.

For over 20 years I use to stretch my watercolour paper with masking tape its not so much the expanse but the whole palaver of wetting the paper waiting and the cutting to length the paper for each side and then wetting and sticking down the paper and occasionally staple or pin the corners  in the hope it stays flat overnight. Many a time I have come back to find it buckled, another day wasted re-stretching again.

Well one day I run out of masking tape and had to come up with a way to hold down the paper tightly-- I just didn't want to wait days for delivery and have to buy more art materials then needed just to get free delivery!

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A few years before I had used ordinary slide binders, the ones uses to hold A4 papers together, to hold my watercolour paper when travelling abroad in my art box. It also stretched my paper completely flat overnight!! So why shouldn't it work on any size paper I thought?

So I cut some MDF i had laying in my shed 5mm to size 22” x 30” full imperial watercolour paper to size. I laid the paper on top and wet it on one side with an ordinary kitchen dishwasher sponge-- waited 5 Min until the shine had gone and the paper had expanded. Then slide on the binders, longest side first, and having cut them to size previously. When all sides were done I left it flat over night to dry –

But because I wet one side, it was bone dry within 5 to 6 hours, and it was stretched to perfection.

Not only did it stretch the paper, but in record time and using minimum wastage, leaving as much paper to paint on as possible.

Of cause the next day I went to D.I.Y. store and bought Exterior Grade plywood 9mm 8ft x 2ft and cut two boards slightly over by 2mm i.e. 22.2 x 30.2 to take into account the swelling of the paper when wet. And a box of white 10mm Or 12mm as long as its more than your board thickness it all works. You can cut whatever board size you want to fit your required paper size – great—that's quite a lot from a full 8ft x 6ft sheet!!!

Anyway it worked again and again. I was very happy with the results and I hope you will be too.

Recommended suppliers:- For Plywood try here, they dont deliver but this store does . You may want to try just one sheet and therefore I suggest you go but take a hand saw and tape measure and pencil so you can cut the board roughly to size to fit in car or on bus! The best place to buy your slide binders is this office supplier on-line or try e bay. The rest is common seance!

Good luck

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