orange gradient no. 9 - imojjen

they accepted one of my paintings for the blacktown city art exhibition this year (though they did reject the one just below - the word became flesh). anyway, this is the painting in the gallery, and a shot of the painting with my model for the image. they even chose to reproduce my painting in the catalogue, which i'm very excited about. i put a price tag on it which i hoped meant that no-one would buy it, as it is a painting of my daughter which i wouldn't mind keeping, but deep down i think it would be nice if someone bought it. i can always paint another portrait of imojjen.




the painting itself was done on a recycled canvas. i like using canvases that students have already worked on and then decided they don't want anymore, as there are built in texture layers ready to go. anyway, this particular one came complete with a nice big tear, so i stuck a new patch of canvas on it to cover it (you can see it sort of top left of the painting). the image comes from a photo bec took in january, which i manipulated in photoshop to get down to 4 or 5 shades. i then painted this onto the canvas. i started by using a projector, which almost helped for the main, basic outline, but proved pretty useless overall, meaning that all the different tones, inspite of appearances, had to be copied the old fashioned way - by looking and drawing.

the word became flesh

a piece of recycled board had some orange, red and cream paint applied, then layers upon layer of text written in mostly chalk pastels. this was built up for a while, focusing on composing the colour areas. then the white was added using liquid paper. all the text is the title repeated over and over.

the top image is the whole work. the lower two are close up sections.

this work was specifically created for the blactown art show, 2009.

collage, acrylic, chalk pastel, liquid paper, pva glue on chipboard.
103x90cm
august/september 2009
$300

peter lawrence

this painting was created at my school's 'big night out' (a kind of expo thing where people come and watch music and drama, visit classrooms, eat food etc etc) in 2007. we set the art room up as a studio with a bunch of students at easels around peter lawrence, one of the school's longest serving staff members (and my english teacher when i was a high school student). we had a bit over an hour to create a work. i had a blank yellowish canvas with lots of textured stuff on it, which i worked the face onto, then varnished at the end. only having that short amount of time means it's very impressionistic, just blocks of tone, really, but it has a nice looseness and directness. the varnish also stripped some of the paint off the textured areas which was quite nice.

the artwork now resides with peter lawrence.

35x52cm. acrylic, pencil, collage and varnish on canvas.
september 2007

20th - january 2009

on the 20th of every month, the fine folk at cabinet pin encourage musicians to write and record an song/piece of music, complete in one day without any forethought or post-editing. all the artists then send their contributions in and they are compiled onto a limited edition cd-r. the only way to get a copy of it is to be a contributor. it's an excellent way to stimulate musical creativity. the artwork is also great and is done by a rotating roster of folk. i've had the honour of doing the artwork for a couple of these now - the latest being january 2009. i basically took some pages out of an old ubd sydney street directory, stuck them to some a4 pages for extra thickness, than ran those through a photocopier which printed the text in black. i then folded and sewed them up and this is the end result.

sketchbook - george

one of my favourite sydney bands going around at the moment is seekae. this is george from seekae, taken from a photo of him in the studio recording their first album. again, it's a scribble sketch, completely in pen, so some things haven't actually worked true to george's actual face, but working in pen, they can't be changed. however, unless you know him really well, you hopefully won't notice!

orange gradients

the first in a (probably) ongoing series of abstract paintings featuring a linear grid of a red to yellow gradient. each has layers and layers of acrylic, aerosol, varnish, collage and anything else i came across, which were then overpainted with thin layers of creamish colours, then finished with the gradient. each are available to purchase - just e-mail me if you are interested.







paintings $100 each