Water Damaged Drawing

No fixer could prepar this drawing for the flooding it had to take. But it does look great!!

"FEAR No.18 JUNE 1990"

I am reading an article in this old Horror/Fantasy/Science Fiction mag at work. There’s an article about Virginia Andrews, a writer who died in 1986. It is discussing her life and how she came to be a writer. Apparently Virginia was inclined to Visual Arts when she was a child and excelled in that area.

At some point she entered into some kind of mentor situation with a school principal, encouraging her in her interests. While reading this something hit me.

"Remember you've got the talent to do anything you want to do as long as you stick to that one branch. Decide which one you want to follow and lop the other ones off."

Woh!! What a thing to tell someone. This is a concept I have grown up with but not described so viscerally. Why lop those braches? To take the analogy even further; where I grew up there was an old orchard of apple, citrus and plum trees. One of those apple trees had three or four different species of apple grafted onto the one. It would produce apples at different times of the year meaning that the tree was always productive.

As an Artist that works in many different mediums I have always felt that the delivery should be dictated by the idea first. The idea of lopping off potentially fruit giving branches makes me feel uneasy because maybe its the right thing to do. There are only two things that really get me going, and it has always been something I have had to justify putting equal amounts of energy into. Am I giving myself a handicap by doing so?

New Blog Time

I have just started another blog just for images that I will scan from my mountain of photo's. I wanted to call it Instant-Gratification but that was not available unfortunately. Still lots of fun to be had there it will be lots of images eventually. There's just two at the moment, but they'll be more to come. The inspiration came from a couple of places.

The first is that last night I was editing photographs for my art website and had to pull out some old photo's. looking through them was such a pleasure that I had to start putting them up around me. not just images of Art but heaps of different stuff; cars, rubbish, friends, textures, and the list goes on and on. there seemed to be some kind of connection symbiotic relation with other work. I would like to think of my Art as being inclusive rather than exclusive so I wanted to include this material some how. But how? They didn't seem to fit in with a gallery show that I wanted to put on at this stage. So I figure this will suffice for now a public space where they can develop some kind of relationship with the rest of the world instead of just with myself. Even if there isn't a great audience that's not that different from any contemporary Art

The second important influence came from a Lecture I attended on Saturday. Harrell Fletcher gave a rather inspiring lecture at the National Gallery of Victoria talking about his own practice across two decades. The introduction of his practice as relating to the world we are in today, by Dr Alex Baker, as particularly relevant a-la G.F.C. That aside, Fletchers approach focuses on finding a way around the Art world and still exist by looking at the community that he's is in. For example a work he collaborated on in the early 1990's. While in graduate school, they found a vacant space and asked if they could use it to exhibit work until someone rented it, as it turned out they stayed for over a year rent free.

So you should keep an eye on it HERE and you will find it in my links over there {--. Save it in your RSS feed reader and get some pictures in your inbox.

Some New Images for My Website

Today I have been working on some images for my website. Going through tones of files, trying to find documentation of work. What a Nightmare! Anyway there aren't any new images on the website just yet but I did find a bunch of images I scanned in from some home developed B/W film. This particular shot was taken using a 3200 iso film. As you can see by the various blemishes on the image I had a little trouble getting the film onto the spindle.For some reason I always end up developing films when it’s really hot. Sweat dripping of my head from frustration as I wrestle in the dark to get the film on. What fun!! Anyway this place has been on route to a supermarket I shop at for years. It has always fascinated me. It has recently been sold and is looking a lot less exciting and somewhere you might find a ghost, and more like every other place in Brunswick. Oh well enjoy!

SoundCloud, IDMforums, and a New Music Host

It has come to my attention that unfortunately some people have not been able to listen to my tracks on my website due to compatibility issues. So I'm the process of looking for an alternative.

The main reason for the current method of streaming is that it is fairly fast and the files remain on my server with rest of the site, and it's mine. What I am thinking of using now is called SoundCloud it is a service much like youtube but for music. Anyway I have found that a few musicians making similar music are using this. I'll give it a shot and hopefully it smooths out any kinks in the compatibility between different browsers. Still a little weary of using a host company for this as it feels a little like handing over ownership. Another exciting possibility is that it may encourage some future collaboration.

If you are interested in having a read of some musical geekology you should have a look at IDMforums. It is very geeky but great resource of ambient and other electronic "IDM" conversation.
Anyway if anyone reads this and has some advice feel free to email me through this link my web Email.

New track is nearly ready!! sounding good so far.

A link to some writting

In this latest edition I will simply pay respect where it is due.
I will post links to two pieces of writing that close friends have written for me and helped write.

The first is an essay that was written for an exhibition I had last year. It was suggested that I would be nice to have an accompanying essay with the show. Originally I was going to write it but quickly realised that it would be  best done by someone who's strength was writing. John helped me previously and had moved to the other side of the country recently. So from the sunny north without seeing what I was planning to make a paper was prepared.

Ocular Lab Blab

Secondly is the much more recent work of my house mate. This was something I had started and was using as a proposal. With lots of help this is what we came up with.

The Psychopompistic Ballistic

Anyway I thought I would add this to the site so you can have a read and get someone else perspective of what I do.