21. A more verbose contribution

Hellooooo :)

I felt a bit more inclined to pondering and prose the last week, so I thought capping it off with a bit of indulgent rambling would be suitable :) Bear with me!

i: 2nd 3rd eye - I was at Single Origin on reservoir street grabbing a morning coffee (awesome place - best coffe I have had in Sydney and inspirational staff working there) and noticed everyone had indian bindi's on their foreheads. I asked the waitress what it was all about and she regailed me with a story about her recent trip to the north of india, and then proceeded to offer me a bindi, which she placed between my brows. Its the second time in less than a week that somebody has placed a symbollic 'offering' on my 3rd eye;

ii: I was stamped with an admission stamp (fluro pink) right between the peepers, last thursday at Oh Really? gallery in newtown, where Daniel O'toole and the gang put on their second 'Culture Jam' gig. Amazing music and art abounded, absorbed by a crowd of dedicated and genuine people. I hang out with the orly crew again yesterday at the glebe street fair, and I have to give it up for them - their dedication and maintained effort to prop up the local scene with good work ethic and strong art practise is an inspiration.

iii: I met two cool young designers at the caffe too - Dan and Emily from Novel Creative (website under construction - but does have a cool showreel) and we had a great spontaneous discussion about our own practises, and the state of the creative scene locally and abroad. They seemed genuinely determined to make a go of their creative, non commercial, more personal work and I want to wish them the very best of good fortune in that endeavor!

iv: I slept in a park for the first time - i mean properly slept - without being drunk or lost! I met another inspiring person over the weekend - a poet - who has helped turn my world around and shake some things up. We spent a very fun early morning randomly exploring poetry, art, laneways and parklands while high on nothing but self indulgent armchair philosophy and cold air. That was a fun night!

v: earlier the same night i hung out across the hallway from my studio at a dance school where I was blown away with some amazing demos of urban break, popping, and freestyle dance. We jammed long into the night and It made me remember how vital it is to work with the body's rhythm and movement - its so fundemental to being a human - and the classes are cheap and run by very professional dancers, so I've signed up for a series of 10 classes to see how many muscles I can pull before I chicken out and go back to wacom-ballet ;)

I have been working on lots of art recently - reinspired by some old novels I am going back to reading for the first time in a few years. One, I already mentioned in a previous post, was China Mieville's 'The Scar', which I have continued to work on with a series of previsualisations which I am in the process of comping out to turn into full feature illustrations. I havn't had this much steam in a long time - and its unusual for me to get so much satisfaction from working with somebody else's ideas - but for now its feeding my soul - so on i roll.

I have felt a big change in the last week. All the spiritually-minded folk are talking about big steps in our mental/spiritual evolution, and while I'm fairly naive to the particulars, I have certainly felt an overwhelmingly clear and lucid change in myself - and I believe in others too - and am very excited by the high spirits and increased communication going on around me. People are talking more, and meeting my eyes in the streets, and discussion and change are being provoked. Im sure you have seen it happening in the arts communities too.

Well thats enough waffling on, for now - so here are some more scans from the moleskine to fill up the void until my next update which will be some digipaints worked up from several of my recent sketches.

A scene from The Scar where Tanner Sack walks through a more quiet district of Armada - This one is the next im taking to colour i think


A page of quick sketches made while I was reading the Scar - visual notetaking to record what was naturally leaking out from my imagination. And on the right, just a random comp started from a scribble.

Left page was some notetaking from a small Da Vinci exhibit put on by UTS university - the students made finctional models of DV's inventions/improvements. On the right, more chaos scribbling.

Random faces. Still struggling!! Just discovered a treasure trove of knowledge on Kevin Chen's space though. Starting to find the forms are clicking and i'm remembering structure.

Random bug-man stuff.

More chaos. I need to get away from using only curved forms all the time when i do stream of consciousness - find ways to loosely approach geometry and solid perspective too.

This one was done to the inspiring live music at Oh Really, and im giving it a small and humble frame to send to one of the band members who got a kick out of it.

All the best to all the best :)
A