Illustrative Berlin Entry

Objects found in my home, my books and magazines; painted onto thick paper using acrylic, then cut out with a scalpel and stuck to a surface with blu-tac. They can be re-arranged, like a matching game. Sizes vary, but most arrangements fit onto an A4 sheet of paper. Pssst: These examples have been scanned and the backgrounds cleaned up a bit in Photoshop!Above: The sweater is one that I made when I was nine. I found it at Mum's recently. The lady's leg comes from a Parisian mini-mannequin from the 1940's. (Mini sized couture gowns were made and displayed to promote the couturiers' skills and to please the Parisian public during rationing.)

Above: Jamila henna box from Sonsa, the lovely Turkish supermarket in Smith Street Collingwood. Hook from the Walt Disney version of Peter Pan.

Above: dinosaur with intriguingly human-like features from a Ladybird book.

Above: this one I am not that happy with and think I will amend it -- perhaps it could be holding something.

Above: this one is slightly evil, I like it. Easter Bunny wrapper from a Coles catalogue, Christian lady's safety vest with "Smile God Loves You" badge from (Un)Fashion by Maira and Tibor Kalman, neatly amputated finger from Farquarson's Book of Operative Surgery from the 1960's (not sure, it's not to hand -- ha ha).

Above: boy from Ladybird book.
The above were completed as part of my entry to Illustrative, a competition based in Berlin. The monkey and rooster from my first effort were included too with amendments, but stubbornly refused to be uploaded again. The first paintings from this series can be found by clicking here.

While on Holiday

Above: the sum total of my artistic effort during my recent stay in Pucisca. Better than nothing-? The stone wall is very Island Brac, as is the little house. Onion from my uncle's little farm and ubiquitous summer washing. Bird from one of my mother's Chinese tea tins. Girl from my head.
Photos, postcards and souvenirs from my trip up next.

I don't know

Above: Sometimes I write sentences in my diary that seem quite profound at the time; and then a few days later don't make any sense at all. I like this one, because it kind of makes sense but kind of doesn't. Perhaps a series of drawings based on nonesensical diary musings would be good? -- I don't know.

Working 9 - 5: Babushkas

Above: One of my proudest recent moments at work (Seed) was getting to design a set of Babushkas. I drew them up on the computer, rather than painting up a prototype set. Besides being alot quicker, it meant that I could grab colours and motifs from recent fabric designs I had already done. I wanted the babushkas to look like the other products that we had in store -- otherwise there would have been no point to us doing our own version.

Above and below: these photographs are of the one of the first prototypes. They were hand painted by ladies in Russia. Can you imagine?! I wish that I could have been there to watch, learn and perhaps even help them paint a few strokes. I am told that the ladies approved of my design, thinking it unusually simple but pleasing. Or something like that -- it must have sounded more impressive in Russian.

Visible Boy Hiding Bird

Above: The other day in the studio I started absentmindedly copying part of the human body illustration from the old Yugoslav children's encyclopedia (which I have posted here before). I decided that I liked it as a motif, especially when combined with relatively benign elements: a dressed body, an idealised landscape sketched from a tin of Italian beans, and a bird. The boy ended up disturbingly reminding me of someone I know very well. Oh, the magic of art making -- cliched but true!

Monkey is a Lung

I moved into a real studio recently. I was a bit nervous about what to do on my first day so I decided to decorate my white walls with some strange new pictures. A Japanese book on Swedish children's interiors (from work) reminded me of those great games where you assemble a person from different cards showing heads, bodies or legs. A clown's face might have the body of a policewoman and the legs of a prince, etc. I love to play with anthropomorphism. Even when disparate elements are put together, the mind creates a story. I think that's amazing. I dipped into my slew of books and tried to get as silly as possible with these, to see how far the mind would go in creating beings out of ridiculous combinations. Above, yes, Monkey is a Lung. Badly photographed on the wall where it now lives.

Above: Chicken is a Fork. (My titles are not very imaginative).

Above: Man is an Orange. I think that one is quite profound, actually. I'm not sure why I am so into the cheesy Mitre 10 Man, but he has appeared again in my work.

I have been away from the blog for a couple of months. Thank you to all of those lovely people who have been looking and commenting -- both online and in person!

Portrait of a Young Man as the Artist

Above: As I write, a film is being made in my very suburb about an artist who obsessively makes self-portraits in an attempt to understand himself. (Not a bad method, I think.) Because it is a film, other people were asked to actually provide drawings of the actor who is playing the character (thespians are too busy to draw themselves, and anyway, I think the director required alot of portraits to cover the studio set). So yesterday I was e-mailed a series of photos of this pretty, self-conscious young man with wavy black hair, a bushy beard (what is it with beards? They are so, like, now!), bright blue eyes, pale skin, a round pink mouth and big pink ears. I had 40 minutes to do both of my drawings, I wish I had had longer: I would love to have been able to concentrate on those three colours that I saw (black, blue and pink) and really simplify his features against them.

Above: this is my second attempt, using my medium of choice, which was black ink. I loved the curls in his hair and I wanted to show their blackness against the pale skin. And even though the blue eyes don't look quite right as there is too much black around them, I'm pleased that I coloured his little mouth brightly. And his ears. An homage to the pretty male subjects of Elizabeth Peyton, as promised a few posts ago (Book Review, December 28, 2007).

Inspiration 2: Italy

Above: one of the many lovely habits that the Italians have is that they like to wrap fruit in printed paper. (In retrospect, it is probably environmentally speaking not such a great habit.) Anyway, it looks incredibly pretty, advertises the good work of the farmer and has probably kept alot of artists employed. I'd love to say that this wrapper is from an orange that I ate in Rome in the summer of 1998, or something, but it is actually a notecard published as part of a series by the ever clever Chronicle Books and bought from Readings in Carlton.

Above: Cool chick of Rome, from Southern Italy, by Mattieu Smedts (The Hague, 1966). Photograph by Kees Scherer. A fantastic book of 1960's technicolour photos, so great that I could almost reproduce the whole thing here. A find from Booktalk, Swan Street, Richmond.

Above: a stamp on a letter that I would have received in the early 1990's, probably from The Florentine Cousin. How could you not love a country that produces such pretty stamps??!!

Above: again, credit to The Florentine Cousin, for finding and sending me this butcher shop's bag. In case you have pondered what might happen to a printed plastic shopping bag after it has sat under glass in a picture frame for approximately fifteen years: the red colour has all but disappeared, rendering those previously irresistible steaks almost unpalatable.

Above: images from The Cooking of Italy, Time Life Books, New York, 1969. Because these photographs sit on opposite pages in the book, I like to imagine that the people sitting in the little nook above are waiting as the lady below them bastes their main course. However, the first picture above was taken in a home (yes a h o m e) on an island near Venice, and the picture below it was taken in a country restaurant near Treviso. I'd be happy to dine at either. Photographs by Fred Lyon.

Above: a reproduction found on the internet of my beloved 1946 Carta Gastronomica by Vsevolod Niculin, which lives in my kitchen and was purchased from The Chapel Street Bazaar many years ago. Mine has faded to a nicer shade of green. If you look across the sea to the Croatian coast, the 'south' pointer sits handily above Brac, the island that my parents come from.

Above: I love vintage Italian (and French) posters. I searched the internet for an example of a travel or food related one to reproduce here. This one caught my eye instead. It translates -- I believe -- to 'Walk in Pirelli'. I think it's beautiful: simple and clever. (Unknown artist, 1950. Image taken from International Poster.)

Yogurt Landscape

Above: this is the first in what I hope will become a series of paintings based on the simple, idealised landscapes found on corporate food packaging. I did this one a while ago, and technically I'm not that happy with it, but it lives in my kitchen regardless. It's based on a tiny landscape that I found on the foil lid of a little yogurt I had for breakfast in Rome in the summer of 2004.

Above: Even though at the time it was cleaned and packed away in my notebook to take back to Australia, the said yogurt lid has since sadly gone AWOL. I downloaded this from the Bayernland website instead. I hope I don't get sued: it is actually a huge German dairy food company. More importantly, I hope that my little audience can see where my landscape came from. Meanwhile, I have tried to work out why I have this strange interest...

Above: My only explanation comes from Burda. When I was a child, my mother lived her domestic life out of this German sewing/craft/cooking magazine. Besides being engrossed in the sewing and knitting patterns, I loved the kitsch German recipes and the advertisements that sat next to them. Here, for example, I like the juxtaposition of the photographed landscape with simple graphic symbols of idyllic life. (Detail of cheese advertisement, Burda, June 1982.)

I'm sure that this won't be my last mention of Burda: I think that if my house was to burn down my collection of these magazines from the first two decades of my life might be what I would grab first. Of course Mum let me keep them: to her they are completely passe'.

Illustrators Australia Webpage

Above: I have finally made a page for my work on the fine new Illustrators Australia website. Will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. One New Year's resolution down, and there's still more than nine hours left in 2007. Must be time for an ice-cold drink...

A Doll Prototype

Above: this morning I made a doll prototype. It will be offered for sale. Her general shape is influenced by a homemade looking doll from the 1940's which I found in the Cheltenham Op Shop many years ago. (I managed to ruin it recently by leaving it out in the rain, hence it won't be shown here.)

Book Review

Above: Nicki Greenberg's incredible and painstaking graphic adaptation of F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In Greenberg's imagination, those tragic and beautiful symbols of the 1920's become a series of wonderful alien and underwater creatures, who tell the entire story in a series of gorgeous vignettes. One of the most universally loved novels is now even more of a treat to read, and re-read. (Melbourne, 2007.)

Above: a great glamorous monograph on the tres-hip American artist Elizabeth Peyton (New York, 2005), who is all of 43 years old. Peyton draws and paints famous people (mostly men) she admires in a style that is somewhat idealising, highly varied in quality and incredibly appealing. Best of all, her work sends art critics into a spin because they want to believe that she has a higher theoretical purpose to her practice than an overgrown 13-year-old school girl drawing in order to possess her unattainable objects of desire.

For example, above: Kurt Writing (Newsweek), 2002, Peyton's portrait of Kurt Cobain, presumably taken from a photograph published in that journal. There is alot of love in this picture, not to mention skill: it just makes me want to take my pencils out, play E.P. (not to mention David Hockney, whom she cites as an influence) and draw all the boys that I like. Watch out male readers, you might see yourselves here one day: if you're lucky.

An Odd Assortment

Above: Unfinished puppet-like figures which were intended for the Bus exhibition last September. I decided that I had enough strange things to show in my little space without these. The most wonderful thing for me now is remembering where I made them: sitting in Amsterdam in broad daylight at 11pm stitching with the thread I had just bought(shown above); winding my cousin's cereal packet into a cylinder while getting bitten by mosquitos in his garden in Florence; and in our family kitchen in Pucisca dipping my aunt's teatowel in coffee and it obligingly drying in minutes in the heat outside. (Hence unpleasantly jaundiced puppet at right; the others had been 'aged' in tea. You learn.)

Above: a shopping bag I made this week as a birthday present for the beautiful Kaz. There's some of my mother's knitting in it, offcuts from dresses I made out of Liberty fabric, as well as a little piece of Sesame Street from a sheet I bought at the op shop in Port Fairy. It's better than one of those ubiquitous green bags.

Above: a summer scarf made out of a length of natural linen, stitched over with various coloured threads. I would like to learn how to weave a whole striped scarf one day; but this will do for now.

Above: papier mache flower people I made ages ago, influenced by the work of Odilon Redon, below.

Above: Odilon Redon, Little Flowers (Human Heads), 1880, charcoal on paper. Reproduced from Douglas W. Druick, Odilon Redon 1840 - 1916, Chicago, 1994.

Above: In turn, the author tells us that Redon himself was influenced by teratology, or the nineteenth century science of monsters, "an opportunity to contemplate the limits of human variability," understandably fashionable post evolutionary theory (p138). This picture shows a pair of conjoined twins called Ritta and Christina, born in Sassari in 1829. Originally published in Isidore Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire's Atlas to Traite de Teratologie, Paris, 1832 - 37.

A Strangely Shaped Piece of Wood

Above: This is what I did on my day off. I painted a lady and child onto a strangely shaped piece of wood that I found recently (approximate height 20 cm). Below is my attempt to explain to you -- and me -- how it came about.

Above: When I found this piece of wood, likely the limb offcuts of The Dancing Man, I thought that it resembled a person. I am one of those people who sees the anthropomorphic in most inanimate objects.

Above: It reminded me of this photo of a man taken in India from the incredible (un)Fashion by Tibor and Maira Kalman, London 2000. His headdress is said to represent heavenward aspiration. I think he is rather handsome.

Above: Looking at the picture of the man in India made me want to look at more pictures of people from various cultures who might inspire my little person's creation, so I also looked at Frances Kennett's World Dress, London 1994. This is a lady from Kyrgyzstan and her child. I find the dress of the people of Central Asia particularly beautiful.

Above: However, when I finished my piece, I looked at it and wondered why I often end up being reminded of this style of depiction, even though I start off aiming for something simple. I do love this creepy Victorian style of caricature for its politically incorrect subject matter, level of realism and kitsch. Children's cop and hangman bowling targets, circa 1890's. Photo from David Longest's Antique and Collectible Toys 1870 - 1950, Paducah, 1994.

Inspiration I: Homeland, Part II

Above: The body is like a machine, from Svijet oko Nas (The World Around Us), a children's encyclopedia in two volumes published in Zagreb in 1964.

Above: From Svijet oko Nas. The first home shows life without electricity, the second one with. Dusty Victoriana becomes Modernist pad, and the dingy attic even transforms into a roof top tennis court.

Above: From Nas Put I (Our Way I), a first grade reader by Edo Vajnaht, published in 1971. At school in Melbourne I would follow the lives of Dick and Jane, and at home in the evening it would be Ivo and Ana's.

Above: Life is good. Ivo tells his father to heed the stop sign while speeding in his convertible.

Above: Pioniri, about to race. In Socialist Yugoslavia, every child was a Pioneer.

Above: Ana waves at a passing ship and learns the alphabet at the same time. This looks not unlike the Yugoslavia of my childhood holidays.