AIR – UPDATE time

It is TIME FOR AN UPDATE!

First I recommend listening to this song because I can’t stop but I can guarantee that youtube will then deliver lots of 90s and early 2000s hits as a follow up. When I was in high school and made a new hotmail email address every week I was inspired to make disco_lemonade@hotmail.com (though I think I spelt disco with a ‘q’) but no one else seemed to think it was cool so it didn’t stick. I suppose I just used it to troll people on MSN messenger.

A LOT has been going on over here. Firstly there was the artist talk, which was nerve wracking and time consuming to prepare BUT very valuable in terms of making sense of my process and my work. The video of the talk is here.

Then Loki and I were NOT DJS, which was great fun. The gallery also hosted some performers that night, we had the pleasure of watching these two wild cards doing some boogin’ and casual box cutter holding. Video available here (the second half is footage of Loki and I playing sweet tunes with Australian animal noises over the top).

On a sad note my grandpa Scott passed away the night before the artist talk. It doesn’t quite seem like a reality because I am so far removed from my family at the moment. I think that it is something that I probably won’t fully realise until I go back to Adelaide for Xmas.

On a good but annoying note, I got a teaching job at a fairly prestigious language school. Annoying because I have a week of orientation that infringes upon my artist residency but good because I managed to bumble my way into a great opportunity. Also, I have a residence card now!

This week I tried out my performance piece, which now has a name – “By-product” and will be performed live this Thursday at the gallery. It will be live streamed also.

I have also been working on some things inspired by the performance but I won’t post any pictures yet because they will be unveiled in the open studio on Thursday.

In the meantime, here are the fruits of recent labour.

I had just discovered that a SPECIAL FRIEND in Melbourne had arranged for me to receive fresh new canvas for my birthday! (ONE THOUSAND THANK YOUS). So I started trying to come up with cool ideas, gone are the days when I can paint over the discarded canvases of students past, I didn’t want to waste it. So I drew the above image – I’ve being doing some more collage and it is inspired by some of the figures that I have been playing with.

But, I wasn’t into it, I didn’t want to waste my canvas on that picture. So I changed gear and did some selfie studies.

I was feeling a bit flat. I liked these studies but still couldn’t bring myself to touch the canvas in case my weird mood wrecked it somehow. So I painted on a big piece of wood Gemma fished out for me in the first week of the residency.

Not quite finished yet. Sometimes painting from a photograph drives me absolutely nuts and I can’t stop finding errors and redoing bits. But sometimes it’s really meditative to just paint in a more realistic style. I tried to use lighter colours than I usually do – I usually end up with dark purple and bright yellow skin tones. Every couple of years I seem to bust out a self portrait like this and then move on so I guess I was due for one.

OH BY THE WAY I AM 31 TODAY!!!!!!! WHAHOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!