I’ve often spoken of the serendipity of creativity – how our heads suck in every thing we experience – sights, sounds, tastes, colours, moments and jumbles them up to create something new. Last year, I stopped over in Japan on the way back to Australia for a couple of days to break up the 26 hour flight and it was there I saw wood block … Continue reading What happens when you cross Japan with Australia?
You see it on Instagram all the time, artist’s posting their latest work, getting thumbs up and endless praise. None of those followers say ‘You’re shit’ – or very few of them. I’ve seen an endless amount of rubbish being gushed over like it’s the new The women of Algiers. As artists, our insecurities mean we love praise, we need it, hunger for it, but … Continue reading You will never succeed as an #artist without someone to tell you you’re shit.
You can’t control what goes on in your head. You don’t know where inspiration comes from – or when it will come. If you try to rationalise it, it often vanishes. The only way to capture it is to get it down, get it out, splay it across a canvas, scribble it down onto paper. For the last few years, I’ve been working from the … Continue reading It’s not pretty, it’s not comfortable, but it’s mine. A room of one’s own.
What’s next? What are you working on now? These are the questions that make my skin prickle and my underarms stream. After a successful exhibition at Stur Gallery in October, where I sold a lot of work, got good coverage in local and regional press and felt people really engaging with the works themselves, the big question people want to know is what’s on the … Continue reading What’s the question contemporary artists are most scared of?
I drank too much. Like many people, when I’m nervous, I drink. Just like on opening night of Dry Your Tears at Stur Gallery. If you popped in and I blithered at you, please forgive my nervy, rambunctious, crazed-faced bewilderment. In the fog of booze, I did have a little eureka moment. Standing there, I was surrounded by all these deeply personal experiences from my … Continue reading When private tales go public #art #collage
This is a new beginning. Sometimes the best thing to do is just start. Put marks on paper, scratch around and create something. My next series is a series of mixed media portraits created in association with Vine videos, little six second snippets of video. I love the brevity of it and turning that brevity into a work on canvas. Tragically, I lost my earlier … Continue reading Six seconds of fame, post pop portraits
Part of the reason I create collage is because it’s cheap. I tear up old magazines to create images and use boxboard as my canvas. It’s rudimentary, but effective. I’m lucky that paper is in love with glue and glue is head-over-heels about paper. As I move more towards assemblage and mixed media, I need to pick up a brush and paint, so of course, … Continue reading When scrimping and penny-pinching are the artist’s enemies
Francis Bacon Five Decades is in it’s last few weeks at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It closes on 24 Feb and I absolutely jubilant for having been able to see it. I had always thought his works as cloyingly macabre, deliberately masticating figures for the joy of it. But seeing them in person, completely changed my view of his work. For a … Continue reading The colours of Bacon haunt me even now
Ray Monde 