I’m having one of those moments, you know the ones, the ‘how did I get here’ moments. I find myself sitting in a kitchen that is not my own, drinking coffee that is not my own and looking after animals which are not my own. This is not a sorry state of affairs, this is actually quite pleasant, how could it not be? The dogs are named after Nick Cave songs and the cats are of a chatty disposition, the coffee is… questionable, but it’s there nonetheless.

No, what I don’t really understand is how it came to be June so suddenly and how I managed to make so many paintings all the while concurrently watching Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Seinfeld, Arrested Development and most recently Boardwalk Empire AND reading a veritable tomb of academia on The Absurd in literature AND reading said absurd literature AND attempting to watch the entire back catalogue of David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman and Wes Anderson films.

Evidently I’m the kind of person who doesn’t believe in sacrifice, and goddamn it, I will unscrupulously consume media and information with a gluttonous rigour.

Hopefully my vigorous (the thesaurus suggests dynamic…) ingesting of film, television and literature has been to the betterment rather than detriment of aforementioned paintings.

Coming off the back of a mid-year review of my current body of work I thought I’d do a bit of an image dump of some of the things I have been working with, you know, keep the world up to date with my goings on and what have you.

This is an idea I have had swimming around inside my brain meat for a little while now. Try and ignore the obnoxious dangly earring and sparkly cat sweater – as it happens they are not key to the reading of this work.  

Below is the collection of work that I ended up hanging for the review. 

And this is how I felt about it, at this stage I didn't even know it would take over 3 hours to hang. If it weren't for my blasted tiny planks of words I would have been home and in bed before 9pm. 

Stay tuned for more witticism and glorious painting puns! These will be brought to you from my own kitchen (unlikely) and with my own animals (rogue backyard bush turkeys count as pets right?)

My brain meat has been producing picture planes and smashing them together with some terrible poetry.  I thought I'd share them on a public forum. 

Here are a few experiments I've been playing with:

Stay tuned for more terrifying squares and tiny hand painted text planks in my next installment. 

A guide to the creative process; just like they teach in Art School 

• ·         Suffer some great injustice or trauma 
• ·         Allow pain to fester into resentment
• ·         Break some things – probably not your own things
• ·         Scribble mindlessly and angrily – maybe your ex-girlfriends face, maybe with black holes instead of eyes to symbolise her thoughtlessness (how deep!)
• ·         Write down some sad words like: pestilence, self-flagellation, martyr
• ·         Lose 20kgs 
• ·         Take up some kind of self-destructive habit – alcoholism is a time tested favourite among established artists. 
• ·         Hate your parents
• ·         Read Nietzsche
• ·         Adopt Nihilism 
• ·         Abstain from friendship 
• ·         Forget what it’s like to have a meaningful relationship
• ·         Make some art occasionally 
  

*good is relative