sketchbook drawings

some sketches from a new sketchbook - my daughter aeowyn gave it to me for my birthday - it has the very hungry caterpillar on the cover. the sketches are all done in biro without any pencil working out. i like the discipline working with biro makes. you have no way of correcting mistakes, so they have to become part of the final image. so mostly i just scribble for a couple of hours for each one, gradually building up the tone. but, if you look close, it is all ultimately just scribbling!

carlos barrios

in late 2006 i met the painter carlos barrios. looking for a subject for the archibald, i thought he would be perfect - he's been hung in the sulman and blake prizes on a few different occassions, as well as a bunch of successful solo and group shows. and he's a great guy. i'd been wanting to do a life-size portrait on a large, blank canvas for quite some time. i painted 3 paintings of carlos but this was the one i chose to enter, and it uses that blankness. it's not completely blank - i first copied a large amount of imagery off a variety of carlos' paintings, plus stencilled specific spanish words that are relevant to his life and work. i then painted over all that with layer after of thinned out white acrylic. that was the longest part of the process with a balance needing to be made between making blank space but still allowing the underpainting to show through up close.

a detail of the face -



carlos' face on this painting is exactly life size. the entire work is 180x120cm.

to take apart to put back together (dr alfred j. coren)

my second go at the archibald. in september of 2004 i had a futsal accident, where a knee smashed my cheekbone. to put it all back together, the surgeon, dr alfred coren, cut from the top of one of my ears, across the top of my head, down through the other ear, then peeled the skin off my face, in order to repair everything without leaving huge scars across my face. and he did an excellent job. in the time i spent with him around then, i learned that he is actually one of the foremost surgeons in his area of expertise (crano-facial reconstruction). i put what he did together with renaissance ideas of image construction. the mona lisa was painted layer by layer - bones, muscle, skin, clothing, as da vinci felt you can't accurately represent an object (in this case human) if you're only painting the surface. i thought that was a similar idea to how the surgeon worked, and also my own style of layering texture up before sitting an image on top. so there's photocopies scans of my smashed face, facial diagrams etc, underneath the final layers of surface image. i also made a feature of his hands, for obvious reasons. and the work is exactly the same dimensions as the mona lisa - 53 x 76cm.

yellow drummer (andy rantzen)

since this is a new blog and i have old work as well, i thought i might start slowly uploading some of it, even though it's not brand new. so to start, the archibald prize. i've entered three times now, though i've never been chosen to be hung. i have neither the name myself, nor the access to high profile sitters that guarantee you a place, but i do like entering anyway as it's a good discipline with deadlines etc etc. so...



my first entry was andy rantzen (he of itch-e & scratch-e fame, most famously, though he's done lots of other brilliant stuff, but it is itch-e and scratch-e that qualifies him as a person of note in his field). this work now sits on my studio wall, and i still quite like it. i was going through a thing with blurred computer graphics at the time, and was wishing to paint that. so the background of this is blurred computer graphics. the actual face is also supposed to be blurred, but that's quite hard to do - i think i nearly succeeded, but not quite.

the image is 130x130cm (i was inspired by the secessionists' use of square canvases at the time, which also reflected one of my favourite design spaces - the album cover).

The Cure - 17 Seconds, Neu! - Neu! '75

The first two Bootlegs photographed in their jewel cases. See below for details.

A.J.E. Bootlegs Artist Statement

Statement submitted with the following two artworks for the Art Groupie exhibition, September 2008:

When I was a teenager, cassettes were the way to build a collection on a budget. Countless C-90s and C-60s were amassed, copied from friends' copies. I always liked to make my own tape covers, religiously hand copying the fonts from the originals. It was the beginning of an obsession with music packaging, which has grown into a significant factor of my own music – both as a musician and in running a microlabel. In part this collection is an homage to my youth.

There is currently great debate about the ethics of digital music distribution. I'm keen to be a part of that debate. The plan is to hand draw my favourite 100 albums which I own. These are the first two in that project. Their number reflects their current position in my top 100 list. As it stands, under current Australian law, these copies are not illegal as I own the original CDs and still own these copies. However, as soon as you decide to purchase one, they will become technically illegal. But, of course, music piracy has many shades of grey – I would assume you won't be buying one of these because you want to own a CD-R copy of the album – it would be much cheaper and easier to head to JB-HiFi or i-Tunes, or switch on your copy of Limewire. You will be buying an idea, plus a little bit of my nostalgia and musical taste, and I'm not quite sure where the law stands on that.

A.J.E. Bootleg #81

The Cure's Seventeen Seconds





pencil on paper
24.2cm x 12.1cm

pencil on paper
24.2cm x 12.1cm

felt tip pen on cd-r
12cm diameter

pencil on paper
15.1cm x 12.1cm

all packaged in plastic jewel case
$70

A.J.E. Bootleg #43

Art Groupie Number 2 opens in two weeks' time and both David and I have work going in. I have submitted the first two of my A.J.E. Bootlegs. Here's the first, Neu!'s Neu! 75:





pencil on paper
48.4cm x 24.2cm

pencil on paper
48.4cm x 24.2cm

felt tip pen on cd-r
12cm diameter

pencil on paper
15.1cm x 12.1cm

all packaged in plastic jewel case
$70

self portrait 2008

i had an abstract orange painting. i was interested in david salle, so added a white strip. i always intended to add a portrait, just never worked out who. with a two week deadline looming for the blactown art show, I figured every artist has to do a self portrait at some stage, so here it is.


self portrait 2008
acrylic on canvas
with pencil, biro, enamel, pva glue, varnish and collage
80cm x 100cm


10.9.08
post script - i just got the details back - the painting was rejected for the blacktown art show.