I wasn’t joking when I said I was going to start out drawing butts with my wrong hand.
Days 5-7 of the residency have seen a lot of this behaviour. The butts I can’t entirely explain but the wrongs hands I can. Probably in every one of my drawing classes I forced everyone to draw with their non-preferred hand. I find it’s a really good way to relax, reduce pressure and relinquish some control. It helps to deal with that feeling where you have a really cool, clear idea in your head of the awesome thing that you are going to do and then you end up with something bung, but not bung enough to make you laugh.
The past couple of days I have been sketching, collaging (digitally and on paper), printing, sculpting and thinking about what form my performance might take.
Here is my ACTION PLAN:
And here is a selection of some of the experiments I have been doing.
I’m trying not to think too much about what where I am going with all this. I’m just trusting that along the way there will be delightful moments where I unlock new ideas or ways of approaching things.
I’ve been doing a lot of wandering around Lisbon and soaking things up. There are abandoned buildings everywhere, hand painted tiles on everything, bandy legged old dudes stealing stone fruit from the mini market, tiny coffees, sardines, otherworldly ice cream, practical footwear (cobble stone streets yo), dog poo everywhere, pleased looking dogs everywhere, hills, bakeries, cheap cheese, old ladies in markets that make you sample chickpeas off the end of their bread knives – that kind of stuff. Here are some visuals,
and then there’s other stuff like vege maccas, street art, indoors art and a bizarre shower that reminds me of 60s movies where people are being futuristic.
Just for a moment reflect on how monumental it is for there to be a delicious vege option at maccas. I’m truly lovin’ it.
Sooooo, back to the art stuff, I think I always thought that it would feel really contrived or forced to be like ‘I’m so inspired by this place, my art is responding to this special thing blah blah blah’ during my residency, but its nice to see that there are definite influences from my surroundings and they are true to my style and personality and it feels natural.
Today I finally allowed myself to go to the art store with a budget of 50 euro, I spent 55. I walked away with a feeling of exhilaration because I have new art supplies and regret because I just blew heaps of cash on art supplies. Does anyone else spend like an hour puzzling over acrylic paints trying to weigh up economic value versus quality with no knowledge except for the price and packaging??? IT TAKES ME FOREVER and I forgot to buy just regular white paint. I invested in some super heavy gel medium for the first time and some weird looking beige house paint from the Chinese MEGASTORE pictured below, strange architecture.
That’s it for today, we just got back from an opening at the gallery called ponto I ponto, I’ll upload some photos of it soon, it reminded me of Zac Svendsen and Carl Jiorjio‘s favourite game ‘I draw a dick, you draw a dick’. There were free bananas (high quality).
Zaratan live streams their events and if you want to see this particular one it is available here. I recommend skipping to 2h 47m to see a baby riding a cat. On September 15th, Loki and I will be delivering a Not-DJ set which will be live streamed until we breach the copyright laws, I will provide more details closer to the date.
