Jacob Hashimoto’s Gas Giant

Jacob Hashimoto’s Gas Giant

Beauty. Repeating patterns. Diversity and similarity.



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mail box box

Book and box made from recycled mail ephemera

Just Make Good Art

I found this today.
Just read the comic, and you'll get it all.
NEIL GAIMAN: Make good art - StumbleUpon:

video of paper art in progress!

Paper art: "Now That Your Dollar Bills Have Sprouted Wings" from Beck's Song Reader - YouTube: ""

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Inspiring you to paint the canvas

I found this on the smallest forest (to which I have now subscribed).
It's a time lapse video of a woman painting, which does indeed, inspire me to paint.

The Incomparable Sara Bowman

I just finished a week at Sturt Summer School in Mittagong, NSW making artist's books with Sara Bowen, who is the woman who began Book Art Object.
I have just bookmarked her blog, which is worth a look!

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My friend Anna

This is my friend Anna Warren's blog.
Just look at her beautiful drawings and paintings and miniatures and prints...

Buy my Newtown Series on Ebay till 30/9/12

I had a lovely exhibition at Buzzzbar.

This was everyone's favourite artwork... for sale now on
E-bay for $30... get in quick!

And now I'm selling the Newtown Series on Ebay.

The works are priced to sell: my ambition is to have my works in 1000 homes. I'm at around 50 now, so please help me.

The starting price for each work is $30, and postage is included in Australia (for overseas I can lighten the package so it's very affordable to send the work to you).

any questions, just call me on 0412 135 426, or email me.

Learning to See: just beautiful

A 40-Minute Crash Course In Design Thinking - 38 minutes of video on teaching people to see.

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Aerial views abound

I love aerial views. Especially aerial view of beaches. Click the link to look at pages from a book with abundant aerial view of just beaches. Click here to see some gorgeous ones.
And the photo above is one I took in Chicago last year. (from the top of the John Hancock building)

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A Game of Real Estate

Acrylic, collage monopoly and scrabble pieces, masking tape on canvas 75x60 2012

A while ago I did a series using Monopoly boards and Kimono patterns (Kimonopoly!).

My friend Ruth, bargain-hunter-extraordinaire, found me dozens of Monopoly sets in opportunity shops around the Inner West.

That’s where these Monopoly houses and pieces come from. I also did a Scrabble series. You can guess where the pieces come from.

If you are good at anagrams it’s not hard to work out what the pieces spell.

The yellow ruler is some masking tape I found in an art supplies store in Chicago last summer.  The background image is from photos I took in Tuscany while there for a friend’s birthday a few years ago.

The street pattern is based on the streets around my home (with some artistic licence!)

So this game of real estate is European, American and recycled. A nice combo for Newtown, I think.

In the Name of

Acrylic and collage on canvas 60x60 2012

This piece was inspired by the names of the streets around my home. Who were they named after? Someone’s daughter or son maybe? Some public servant in far off England you were hoping would give you a land grant? The local lord? So each street is named for where the names came from on this pseudo-map, based loosely on the streets around my home in Newtown.

The top collage layer is made from oil pastel rubbings of timber. The background images include an old typewriter keyboard and machines on Cockatoo Island – in honour of Newtown’s industrial past.

Industrial Son

Acrylic, oil pastel and thread on paper on canvas 75x60 2012

Winnie, who has lived in my street in Newtown for more than 80 years tells stories of every factory that was within a few miles of our place. People walked to work in glove factories, box factories bread and boot factories.

By the time I moved into Newtown in the 1990’s most of those factories housed auto repairs, and in the past 20 years they have all disappeared.

This piece begins with an oil pastel rubbing on rice paper I did on my favourite machine on Cockatoo Island. I superimposed a hand drawn map of Newtown (thanks Google maps!), and added some acrylic washes.

With its strong golden yellows and oranges the work literally shines like the sun.

Interlacing Newtown Streets

acrylic and collage on canvas 75x60cm 2012

My friend Chris gave me an old lace curtain. I loved how it changed the world of what was underneath. This piece works on that association. I think of the nosy neighbour, Mrs Kravitz in Bewitched, but literature and movies are filled with observers, kind and otherwise, who peek through curtains.

The under painting was inspired by a summer spent in Italy for a friends’ 50th birthday. I superimposed the map of Newtown. The A shape recurs throughout this series, with some artistic license.

There is something similar between the feel of maps and the look of lace. I added a few buttons and beads and some rubbings from Cockatoo Island machines for good measure.

Overall this piece makes me feel happy.

King Street Camel

acrylic collage found objects thread on canvas 80x27cm 2012

I love maps.

This piece is based on some English road maps from the 16th Century, which, in absence of google earth plotted roads on long scrolls.

One night while having steak and mash at the Coopers Arms I asked people what Newtown meant to them. Those important sites are listed on this map.

The metal letters I bought in a craft store in Chicago in 2008. The camel I picked up in the streets of Marrickville on one of my walks. I think it was part of a great find including some Fuzzy Felt and some flash cards with rabbits on them.

I sewed the road, and created a scroll. 

Nana Lily's Music

acrylic collage and thread on canvas 88x27 2012

This piece was created after King Street Camel. I took the 16th Century English map concept, and added to it.

My Nana, Lily Gilligan, lived at 100 Lord Street St Peters for a number of years before she died in the 1970’s. She was a Musician (and hospital cleaner). When she died she left me all of her piano music: popular pieces that you only hear now when Glee does a revival: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and the Andrews Sisters. There was also quite a bit of Classical Music: Beethoven, Czerny and Chopin.

The top right hand corner of this work includes a little of her music. 

Performing

acrylic and collage on canvas 85x45cm 2012

One of the important things about Newtown for me is living so close to excellent live theatre and comedy venues.

And of course taking a walk up King Street on a sunny day offers brilliant skies. Just look up next time you’re walking from Newtown Square towards Thai Pothong: the beautiful old building on the corner there is often breathtaking.

This piece takes some of my tickets from the 2011 Fringe Festival and re-forms them into King Street-inspired shops.

And the sky!

Shadows of Home

found objects, acrylic and thread on canvas 75x60 2012

This is part of my walk mini-series. It is based on a Sumerian map from the 13th century. It shows where I go on my morning walks.

Right in the middle of this piece is “our” from a 1970’s sentence maker. Kids acquired words like this one and arranged sentences from a long holder a bit like we use to make scrabble words. My mum taught infants school for many years, and when she moved a few years ago she let me take a whole set of sentence maker words away with me!

The shadowy building in the foreground of this work is cut from a piece of plastic mosquito netting I picked up in Enmore on one of my walks. I like the moiré patterns it creates when it folds against itself.

The pearls come from an old doll’s necklace.

Terraced Industry

acrylic collage ink and thread on canvas 40x30 2012

This (for me) tiny piece uses collaged streets from textured oil pastel rubbings of timber, and inked in drawing of terraces in the style of a 16th Century Aztec map I love – where no perspective is required.

This was the first of the Newtown pieces on which I used the sewing machine. I quite like the way the stitching approximates iron lace.

Thai Europe Coffee

acrylic ink and thread on canvas 30x86 2012

This piece takes the format I developed with King St Camel and Nana Lily’s Music, and applies a different map.

I love the Underground maps: where a city is compressed in a simple easy to read format.

Newtown compresses a world of cuisines into a small space, so I played with a series of underground-resembling maps which plotted the international cuisines we have access to.

This map only shows the Thai food, European food and Coffee lines: The other maps didn’t make it in!

Of course the tricky thing is that Newtown food is a literal moveable feast: even in the three months I’ve been working on this series some of the places listed here have closed and others have opened up.

Is your favourite there?