Illustration, Copic pens on bleed proof paper 45x28cm

Like the stipple based drawings elsewhere throughout the blog the image to the left is an illustration of the type normally provided by graphic artist’s for use in magazines before computers took over image making. Both of my main lecturers at the Bachelor of Fine Art would agree that these works were not art. They would have been wrong. You only have to look at the work of Lichtenstein or Warhol to see where the divide is bridged. The various doodles throughout the blog are also Art. The blog is Art! I am an artist and this is one part of the output of my creative efforts and twenty years of study and research. It is Art and Art with a capitol ‘A’ and has the potential to bear all of the pretension and bullshit that surrounds the elitist endeavours. Those elitist identifiers and expectations are put there by others. Slogging along in the stink of my own feet and farts in a fog of depression and pain I can safely say that pretensions are small things here.

The image to the left was done during the Graphic Arts Certificate Course at Hunter Institute under the amazing teaching of one Lorrae Obrien. She was a very fine teacher and I would have happily studied with her and the other instructors in that course for years. They had a lot to give and I could see the niche where it could be put to work.

My own attempts to put an exhibition of various works using ink on paper has stalled and probably sunk for now. The frames have gone from approximately fifty dollars  to almost seventy in just a few months. The framers do not seem to be able to follow instructions regarding the sizes and white space I want around the drawings. I think I have had nine? done and the white space and sizes range all over the place. To get to the full exhibition there would be several types of ink drawing including the dozen stippled drawings I have in hand now plus almost twenty other ink architectural images. I would have to be able to be able to trust the framers to understand my instructions the first time as I am often ill and having to battle to get things done is beyond me. I cannot see how to overcome those problems while I am limited as I am.

The trouble with the estate agents has cost all my saved cash after the few frames I have had done. When I am forced out of this apartment the work I have done regarding buildings in Budgewoi will be unsaleable unless I can get a place in Budgewoi and there is nothing but hovels in my price range if there is anything.That money may be considered lost as is the goodwill and the advantage of being established and locally known.

Bird of Paradise Flower

There is an 80 x 130 cm canvas on a stretcher sitting about at the moment. Actually there is one in the garage half-built as well but I favour the first. The one in the house is a used canvas with deep paint and medium. It is well-worked deep acrylic  with complex surface colours and textures. It was an attempt to create a ground surface reminiscent of a forest floor with all the leaves and tiny grasses but it failed. I may work some small Bird of Paradise Flower drawings in pastels or water colour pencils and see if I can get an image that will translate to a palette knife work on that canvas. A lot of people think the Monstera image done some months back was a failure but I find the complex under-surface and the coarse palette knife work to be beautiful.

You cannot see the surface structure here but that is the painting I am describing 1.3m x .8