Category Archives for Visual Art

Mural Mural on the Wall

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Aaaaaaaand it’s done. Chicken mural – check… en mural.

The Pensive Poultry Collection’s Zen Hen? Glorified. Dr Klaus and thedarclaud? Creatively immortalised until they rent the building out to someone else and repaint the whole place white. Good thing I took some photos.

Massive thanks to [freespace] for giving us a wall to get clucky all over. Last night was the exhibition and fundraising party – the most bohemian of hoots. Full of LED lights, bubble machines, face paints – wow. It’s sounding more like a rave. It really was very bohemian. There was an organic veggie patch and a ‘parkcycle‘.

By the looks of the freespace july indiegogo campaign today, we’re going to have another month of it…. which translates to another mural! STRAP IN, BARNYARD FANS. Probably looking at some bovine related content next time around, so all you beef enthusiasts – brace yourselves.

Pre-party and jazzed:

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Good heavens! My hand has disappeared.

Expanding the Canvas – Work in Progress

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Turning lemons into lemonade. Isn’t that just something. I think that I can attribute a good proportion of the successes in my life to exactly this.

The proverbial ‘closing a door and opening a window’.

And this time, it lead me to this mural I’m working on with Klaus.

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It was a miserable drizzling day yesterday in San Francisco but we were still endeavouring to get to some free dance classes in Golden Gate Park. After a cascade of events that mounted against the dance class plan, we found ourselves heading to a ‘postcard festival’ in SOMA as advertised on fun & cheap. Turns out there is only one post card in the whole place, but it’s crammed full of artists and they’ve got a wall that they’re wanting us to work on for the [FreeSpace] exhibition on June 26th. HELLO LEMONADE.

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So we rode our bikes through the rain today with a backpack full of paint (leftover from prop building for Winning Formula), masking tape and tupperware and laid siege on this wall with only a vague plan in place. And who dropped past while we were working? This suited-and-tied chap with some deep Patrick Bateman vibes. How’s Christian Bale playing Bateman and Batman? Only difference is the ‘e’. Well there are lots of character differences but that’s not where I was going with it. Anyway, the guy who came to visit was the Lieutenant Governor of California and former Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom (here’s an image comparison just to make this all worthwhile: Newsom vs. Bateman). Nice guy though.

We’re halfway done on this mural and I’m heading back tomorrow for round two. Ding ding.

Pensive Poultry 2 – Ugly Goose

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Collaboration: Watercolour by Dr. Klaus, Ink by thedarclaud

Well how about writing something?

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The last three years of my writing work just culminated a little over a month ago in shooting Winning Formula, my feature film with LFL Entertainment. There was such a wild flurry of writing for so long that when we went into production, the physical doing of filmmaking was such a welcome change.

Last night I hit the cinema to watch This Is The End which was so massively entertaining (although it did beat me to the punch on a Backstreet Boys reference and cameo which gave me the irits a bit) and it was a real call to action to get back to writing, something I’ve been contemplating over the past few weeks but pushing aside to draw chickens.

I feel like drawing for me is so instantly satisfying. You think of an idea, draw, and then you have a picture. And it’s done. Not like filmmaking. That takes a long ass time. You think of an idea, you refine it, you plan it out, you write it, you revise it, you – anyway trust me there’s a ton of steps before you have a picture. As you can imagine, the product and the emotional payoff from working on a project that’s at the scale of a film is proportional. And by that I mean huge.

So I’ve got 3 different film concepts in mind. All very different, but all comedy… I think. And there’s one concept that has the potential to be the complete celebrity orgy that This Is The End was… if I get lucky. And as Get Lucky is apparently the song of the summer, I reckon I’m in with a chance. I dig good omens, no matter how much they are not specifically directed at me. So keep ’em peeled! In the meantime, Winning Formula is in post production so there’ll be a ton of content pouring through the facebook page as we move towards release. Frothing.

Guys. Relax. There’ll be more poultry. Probably even as soon as tomorrow. You might just get clucky.

Pensive Poultry 1 – Zen Hen

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Collaboration: Watercolour by Dr. Klaus, Ink by thedarclaud

French Toast

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Turns out French toast ain’t French.

Close Encounters of the Canine

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Collage Me If You Can. Wait. No. Collagic Park? Of the 51 Director titles that Steven Spielberg has listed on IMDB, you’d think I could come up with a great wordplay for this collage. Wait – Nope. Nothing. Not even a dog-related pun. Wait – Close Encounters of the Canine. THERE IT IS. Changing the title of this post right now. See you later Collage Me If You Can…ine?

So – the collage. It’s a young Steven Spielberg circa 1978 with his dog Elmer. The story on there is about loneliness.  And you guessed it, it’s pigment and water, white acrylic paint and black ink pen. The imagery comes from the book ‘Romance and Chivalry’ (not sure of the author – I’ll look into it – that’s not a promise though), a bag from the Museum of Modern Art, Interview Magazine (edited by Andy Warhol) and The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine book by Max Wilk and Lee Minoff.

There was that day when mum was away in Adelaide and Tan picked me up from the hospital because I’d fallen down the stairs and broken my finger… I sat in the wheelchair because I had a bruised back and twisted ankle (and also for dramatic effect) using very colourful language when she came to the hospital. She dropped me home. The house was empty and I felt so alone. So I let all the animals inside. And I spooned the dog on the sofa.

Sometimes you’ve just got to get cuddling.

3 French Hens

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KarlLage

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And I didn’t even plan the title. I swear. KarlLage?! Are you kidding me here? It’s a collage featuring a young Karl Lagerfeld? It certainly does appear that all of my linguistic Christmases have come at once.

Anyway, the collage – Again it’s pigment and water, white acrylic paint and black ink pen. The imagery comes from Interview Magazine (edited by Andy Warhol), The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine book by Max Wilk and Lee Minoff and some wrapping paper from the 60’s that I found. It’s about having to be stern when you really just want to carry on like a pork chop. Karl’s got his standard expression with a sneaky Mona Lisa smirk creeping through while he lays down the law.

Be a sport.

Please stop being so wicked.

KarlLage. I mean really.