Thursday, November 18, 2010

61. There's no place like home (unless you deign to roam).

I have lived in 13 houses in 4 years.

I have to say, I love the experience of constantly being on the move. I am not a material person by nature, but the full time pursuit of art tends to magnetise an array of books and art supplies to the creative studio. Moving a few times each year has forced me to continually reevaluate, prioritise, and purge a lot of what would otherwise have become dusty baggage shuffling from one domicile to the next in cardboard boxes.

We just moved house again this week, to what is our first real apartment that we have had full control over. No roommates, no family, no restrictions. Its a small studio apartment in Kings Cross, Sydney's 'Red Light District', if you could call it that. Its a fascinating area - rough, old, unpredictable, dirty, beautiful, creative and desperate. It's madness, and it can be joy to ride the eye of the storm while such an environment rages around you. For someone interested in the study of human nature, it is like daily access to a psychological wetlab.

We are setting the apartment up to cater for our painting - splitting time between home and the Cartel studio. One is for efficiently and professionally chipping away at the long term visions of our group of painters... the other allows us to be truly ourselves, raw and without pretext. It may sound hyperbolic, but for someone who usually embraces the intuitive dislocations of the nomadic lifestyle, fostering a nest - even if it is a temporary one - is a new and exciting prospect. 2011 is shaping up to be an amazing year, and I am inspired to be living it out in these two spaces until the wind should blow me elsewhere.



Vito, Piccolo Bar


Cumulo: Studio View

Sunday, November 14, 2010

60. Today's Painting Session

Every Monday at Cartel we have been working with some great life models, doing 3 hour study sessions. Our recent routine has been based on Keith Dewell's recommendation of 3 quick limited palette studies per session, although we are still toying around with different combinations of shorts and longs.
These are the two longs from today. The standing figure is 40 mins (2x20) and the portrait is 60 mins (3x20).

59. Passwords

Somehow my FTP pass got changed a while back... finally got it back in order :)
Have a lot of content to post, going to spread it out over a few days.


Going to start with a promo image I did for Sydders band Cosmonaut:


And some work from early in the year:
All images (c) Wizards of the Coast