The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus by Gilbert Shelton.

The three are warped in their own unique way the idiot, the street smart and the nerd, but they maintain common traits such as a love for consuming copious amounts of mind altering drugs (though, they turn their noses up at heroin), chasing loose hippie chicks, as well as scoffing at the idea of working a 9 5 job… take that back, scoffing at the idea of working at all. The comic thrives on old school slapstick humour and also makes for very trippy artwork. As drugged out as they are, the Freak Brother are truly lovable characters. You’ll also enjoy the strips of Fat Freddys Cat an even more sarcastic, cynical, bad ass version of Garfield.

What does Tomma Abts do? Well she actually paints abstract art usually in oils or acrylics. Something of a novelty for the Turner Prize some would say. Tomma Abts was originally selected for her solo art exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and Greengrassi, London.

The images or paintings of Tomma Abts are created by the repetiton of various geometrical shapes on a base of rich colour. Personally – I dont think that Tommas approach to painting is particularly original. However I have to admit that while not being “knock out” I find some of Tommas images pretty compelling and touching. I have to say that this does surprise me.

These are the dimensions of every Tomma Abts painting. Im not sure quite why Tomma selected these dimensions. Obviously she finds them appealing and I suppose they make for a very compact painting.

When creating titles for her paintings apparently Tomma simply plucks one from a dictionary of German first names. Titles like Veeke for example were created in this way. In my view this is surely only slightly more interesting than numbering each picture!

All in all I think that Tomma Abts creates abstract art that is pretty accessible to the public at large. This is something that perhaps could not be said about the artwork of previous Turner Prize winners! I base my opinion of course on Tommas prize winning paintings. I would go further and state that I cannot conceive of a Tomma Abts creation offending anyone – even slightly.

In the end its just my personal opinion but I do believe that its entirely posible that Tomma Abts will go on to become a household name within her own lifetime…Of course she could also disappear without trace from the media and our minds in the blink of an eye, for precisely the same reasons.

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