Duel weilding

So I'm in the unusual position of  having work in shows on both sides of the Tasman. My Wooly Bully show is up til the 23rd or the 24th if yr lucky, and my Evidence painting is making another appearance in a Christmas exhibition, this time as part of Seed's 12 Days of Christmas. Apologies for the shitty photo, it's actually much bigger and better looking, and so Christmassy!

lil' aliens

These little paintings grew out of my uncanny plant works from the middle of the year. I'm really into cacti and succulents at the moment and am having fun working with gouache in restricted palettes.  These will be for sale as part of my Wooly Bully exhibition, most likely cash n' carry so you'll have to be in quick!

Getting promoted!

The nice folks at Three Thousand were kind enough to add my exhibition to their calendar of events in Melbourne. Yay! Now y'all Melbournites will have to come. 

Inklings

A couple of little ink drawings, might take them to Melbourne with me. More fun with dip pens!

Melbourne exhibition!!

My first international exhibition is at Wooly Bully, which is the best shop in Australia, a comics shop/record store/cafe which also sells hot sauce!! Everybody wins!! I'll be selling some screen prints, tote bags and other art bits, come by if you're in Melbourne!

Screen printed booklplate

I've managed to produce a few of these, even though I'm not so hot at registration and at least half of them were too crooked to use, but at least the colours came out well. It's hard to see in the photo but the black is more of a dark bluish green. The print is modified from the bookplate stamp I made my sister last year, she's a total bibliophile and stamps all her books before lending them out.
I'm thinking of selling these in sets of two or three, but I'm not too sure how much to charge for them, any suggestions?

Toting totes

Finally printed some tote bags! At the moment I have my Kathmandu Cat-man in black on cream  and my Castle print in white on black. The bags are made of 100% cotton canvas. I currently have them for sale at the Audio Foundation shop in Auckland for $15 each and will be bringing some to Melbourne for my mini-exhibition at the best shop in Australia, Wooly Bully (more on that soon). Currently looking for more stockists too.

Thee Oh Sees - again!

Well The High Seas (our deceased shop/gallery) is still sort of around, only now we just help to bring bands to our far-flung shores. This is the second time we've helped to bring them over, and the second poster I've done for them, was on a bit of a 50s sci-fi buzz for this one, painting it really made me want to read more sci-fi. It's gouache but this time on beautiful, heavy, 550gsm, only-comes-in-large-expensive-sheets paper. Sooo dreamy!

I forgot to take a pic of it in progress, but here it is with some side scribbles.

Clues

 These are my 10 works for Seed's Christmas exhibition. They have titles like Skirmish and Escapee. The gouache went so nice and vivid on the plywood.

Decent exposure.

Finally made it into VIVA, mine's the cross next to the text, one for Seed's christmas show. Too bad they didn't put the artist's names on, but still.

Post Graduate Diploma Done Did

For some reason I decided it was a good idea to finish off the year with a tromp l'oeil painting. 

I had been conducting research into the history of St Paul Street (where the art & design school is located) and found an article about an amateur magician who died aged 29-30 (accounts of his age vary) on St Paul Street in 1925. His death was reported as a 'supposed suicide', which struck me as being a little odd because from other research I did into him (through the wonderful resource paperspast) things seemed to be going pretty well for him, but that's the trouble with relying on newspaper articles for all your information, you just get the public face. Anyway, this man Reg. R. Oakley was the basis for a number of works throughout the 2nd half of the year. This painting shows a mixture of real and tweaked artifacts, the idea being that you can't tell which are genuine and which are invented, blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, which seemed appropriate as a tribute to this long dead magician.

FUN FACT: The photo in the painting (the one in the album, not the one sticking out the side) is a composite of a photo titled 'Mr. Oakley' which I found on the heritage images site, with the head of my grandfather who also died mysteriously, albeit in 1951.

 Installation view of Sleight of Hand, watercolour on paper.

Detail of Sleight of Hand, watercolour on paper.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Pieces of the puzzle

Here are some pics of my work for Seed gallery's christmas show. Every year they give each artist 10 identical shapes to make into artworks. This year I'd been reading too much Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, so they're all murder mystery themed, I thought their shape suited it, being a bit puzzle like. The show opens on the 22nd of Nov and is up until the 8th of Dec. More pics to come!

Control your blues

Blues Control are coming! This poster went through a lot of transformations before I was happy with it, fun to do something not strictly hand drawn. The photo is one from my travels, mountains in eastern Iran.
Info about the tour here and hear their stuff here.

lazin' legs

Heather Leigh poster.

A poster commission for the Audio Foundation, it was fun getting back into detailed pencil drawings. Heather Leigh is from the US but now lives in Scotland. More info on the tour here and here

Push that gouache around

Spring lady.

The cover of a mix CD for a dear friend and snappy dresser. It's sort of a portrait.

The case of the missing magician

A fake book cover I made for my school work. I've been doing a lot of research into the story of an amateur magician who died in 1925 on the street where my school is now. His name was Reginald Oakley.

The back cover.

Skink-buzz

A present from my cat. Poor little guy had already lost it's tail.

I rescue them from her when I can, such delicate digits.

Rugged

I did this drawing for a gig poster I'm working on. Really into rugs at the moment.

Drybrush

Brushing up on my drybrushing skills.

Exquisite Exhibition

Here's the full exquisite corpse for the Seed gallery exhibition which is on from the 4th-21st of July, preview on the 3rd 5.30 - 7.30. Tabatha Forbes did the top and I did the bottom.

Exquisite corpse

Some details from my recent painting for Seed gallery's Exquisite Corpse show. So good to do some painting again! The idea for the show comes from the collaborative drawing game, exquisite corpse. The exhibition opens on the 3rd of July, more about the exhibition here 

Gazalea

Here's a screenprint I made for my recent school stuff. It's called Gazalea, get it?