What you can do to help artists during COVID-19. Everyone is meeting their friends for drinks online. From our dining chairs in Seattle we look across the table through our laptop to our friends at the other side of the table in Summer Hill. We’re all drinking white negronis and it’s beautiful. Two hours in a heartbeat. People are working online, making startling discoveries about … Continue reading The show must go on. Online.
What the Australian bushfires taught me about making decisions in a time of coronavirus (COVID-19). I’m one of those people that likes to be prepared. I check the exits on a airplane. I feel under my seat to make sure there’s a life jacket there. So when the mountains burst into flames behind my house in November 2019, I planned to leave. I love my … Continue reading Too late to leave. Stay in place.
Sometimes art goes bad. Look at her face. The horror. This is not intentional. I wasn’t trying to create an image of a women who had been burnt in an accident. Or a woman trapped in a disfiguring face mask. I was trying to create a woman with attitude, cigarette in hand, giving the viewer a withering glance. I didn’t have the right colour papers … Continue reading What to do when things go horribly wrong (in art)
Taking risks sometimes pays dividends. The risk is worth the reward. Other times, they fail terribly. Like at my high school dance. Important lessons from risk-taking The school dance is beach themed. I thought it would be a good idea to make breasts out of coconuts and pink socks, wrap myself in a hibiscus tablecloth and apply red lipstick. I remember looking at myself in … Continue reading Suburban LA life for The Other Art Fair
In just an hour I set up my works for my new show, It’s for your own good. These works explore experiences from my childhood that inform who I am now. It’s extraordinarily handy having all the works the same size and so expertly framed, because it was a simple case of banging in a nail in the wall and hanging the works. You can … Continue reading Bumping in to M16 Artspace
How our childhood lives affect us as adults – there’s always a child-self inside us. Continue reading It’s for your own good
As a kid our cat Sally would mate with a feral Tomcat who lived in the wild. Two months later she’d pop out a litter of kitties, often in the washing basket in the laundry, amongst our dirty socks and pyjamas. Sally was a good mother and a beautiful cat with an incredible light grey fur, a colour I’ve never really seen since. And couldn’t mix … Continue reading Drowning kittens; saying bye bye to my babies #art #artforsale #newhome
Just before Christmas, Saatchi Art let me know I had sold one my my landscapes to a collector just outside Atlanta, Georgia. It was quite a euphoric moment for me as this work was one of my favourites from my Dark Side of the Road series that was shown during Art Month at Gaffa Gallery in Sydney. I love that it’s gone to a new home, … Continue reading Georgia on my mind #artforsale #modernart #collage
Art for art’s sake is a beautiful idea – but artists have to eat. Few of us have generous benefactors to lavish funds upon us, so a sale means we can keep going. Selling work means we can buy new art supplies, sales mean we can secure a space in a studio or artist-run-initiative (ARI) and sales mean we can keep doing what we love. … Continue reading SOLD, SOLD. Why sales validate artists.
I’m red-faced even as I write this. I thought it would be a great idea to write my ‘to-do’ lists on index cards. It works fairly well, I can shuffle through and do the things I feel like doing without having this long list staring at me. The dumb part of the idea was thinking it would be fun to photograph myself with the card … Continue reading Why dumb ideas should die. Oh the shame!
Ray Monde 