Recently in Art Category

I was flicking through Mr Grubber’s fine RSS feed this morning (as you do) and found my way to the new song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -

I Should Have Known It.

I agree with the DF, it’s a great tune. It’s slick, pop-rock and I like it. It could be a shocker in less competent hands but Tom has such cred’ in his delivery that it works for me. There are some contrived edits of the band interacting with each other but that’s just a bit of fun.

Art aside, something in the background of one shot caught my eye. There’s a poster on the wall that has been obscured about two thirds of the way through the video. Something legal didn’t like I guess. Perhaps someone wanted payment.

I wonder what it is?

Saint George, later in life, meets another dragon and things don’t go as well as they did last time.

George has had a good life but when he gets older and a bit wiser he begins to question things he would have taken for granted previously.

Where is my beautiful lance? What is my beautiful lance? Why is that dragon looking at me that way?

The lance, a symbol of sexual and spiritual virility is broken, it’s more of a snapped blind-persons cane. It’s a symbol of beliefs, of a faith that’s broken.

These Lance paintings are about my father, poor bugger, he wasted a large part of his life fooling around with a seriously fucked-up religion, only to find later in life that he didn’t have the resources to get past what he saw as a loss of faith.

I said “What does it matter? So there’s no God, move on to something else, open a bookshop or something”.

more…

She lived in the beautiful area of Porangahau in the North Island of New Zealand.

Martin Luther was a bit of a prick really, I never did like having him over to stay.

Here's another one from a while ago. 1989, The Triffids at the Enmore theatre in Newtown, Sydney, Australia. Standing room only, poor sound but I guess that's the deal with the real thing.

Here's an oldie. The last time I saw Bob Dylan in concert was in 1986 in Sydney Australia. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers were support. It was great, but hell that's a while ago now. Back to the EntCent to see him again Aug 15 2007 - let's see what 21 years of touring does to a singer. And how about that price 26 bucks!

I just mixed up another batch of the medium I use for oil painting. I seem to always loose or forget the recipe so I decided to store it here for safe keeping. This is a simple recipe with damar resin, stand oil and gum turps. I don't bother with dryers or other ingredients, too lazy.

You can of course buy a ready-made medium but they generally don't tell you what's in them and also I find something meditative about preparing my own. It's a method of procrastination that feels as if you are doing something art related - anything but actually face the risky business of painting.

The recipe for the medium I use is in the proportions 1:2:5. That is, one part damar varnish, two parts stand oil and five parts refined turpentine. This gives me the base mix and I pour some off and add a little more turps for the lean underpainting as required.

See the full recipe here... and feel free to let me know if you have a variation on the theme.

Here's a triptych of charcoal drawings on paper from 1987. I liked these, they had an Aussie summer feel about them to me. They hung around on the wall for so long the poor quality paper fell apart somewhere along the line. 

I've got the dance floor from Strictly Ballroom up on eBay for sale. The floor used to be installed in my studio years ago but it's been in storage for years and I think it's about time someone else had a go. Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom is listed on imdb and the floor can be seen in the trailers hosted on that site.

Another recently digitised image. This painting is titled The Beggar Feeling Awkwardly Clad in Saint Martin's Famous Cloak. It also appeared on the postcard for the exhibition titled Naked held at Baby Enzo back in 1995. I realise this blog is well and truly ex facto delectatio morosa but such is the onanistic nature of blogging. :-) 

I recently had transparencies of some works digitised and I'm in the process of adding the new images to the site. This one titled Sowers is from 1991 and was sold at an exhibition a while later. It was about Reagan and Gaddafi and their insane behaviour back then - nothing much has changed really, different punk-actors the same old story.