Happiness Is A Warm Cat

As anyone who has ever been owned by a cat can attest!

I love this piece for several reasons. First and foremost it celebrates cats and how wonderful they are. That soulful look in the leopard’s eyes is the same as I have seen from my own Felis Domesticus.

Secondly, in keeping with the titles it’s 100% cute with nothing lewd or cynical at all.

And thirdly it represents one of the few pieces I’ve [successfully] executed with yellow as the main colour. Me and yellow aren’t usually the best of friends.

I gave this to one of my sisters as a housewarming present. Needless to say all three of my sisters love cats as much as I do.

The Black Candle

Do artists see things differently from normal people?

Black-CandleThis piece is taken from my 2013 ‘Fiendish Comix’ show.

I painted all the canvases first and then selected the collage elements. Only once those were glued down did I go looking for speech bubbles – I knew that if I chose them first I’d end up letting the words influence the collages.

I found this particular speech bubble really poetic and held it aside waiting for the right canvas to match it with. It sounds a bit melodramatic and self-pitying which is exactly what I wanted, I’m taking the piss out of pretentious artists who feel things more much more acutely than the rest of us, just as much as I’m taking the piss out of well-dressed Victorian characters.

Soap Opera

A glamourous and meaningless comic for all ages.

soap-THA very old collage, mid-late 1990s I would say. In those days I was still using a mixture of photos, illustrations, and comics. I’ve stopped using photos now since my main stash was National Geographic and those images are pretty easily recognisable.

As with all of my comics, I’ve chosen text and speech bubbles that make a strange kind of sense and tell a story, albeit a disjointed one.

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

I’m a man of wealth and taste.

Please-Allow-Me-To-IntroducThis is mostly built from the incredible engravings of . I have a few books of his work and they’re just wonderful source material to work with – detailed and classical and sinister all at the same time.

I’m not really a Satanist or anything like that, though I did once enjoy some [very] minor teenage celebrity because it was rumoured I was dating a Satanist. Actually she was just a Goth, not a Satanist at all.

Box O’ Birds

My successful entry for a competition for a commission to create a mural on a large metal box owned by the phone company.

Box-o-BirdsIn 2015 I stripped, sanded, and painted this box with a reproduction of a collage, with help from my lovely wife. She’s a far better painter than I so she took care of the finer details.

The original piece on canvas is for sale if you are interested.

If you are in Dunedin (NZ) you may want to drive past it to take a look!

Evil Ones

Great canvas piece from the 2013 ‘Fiendish Comix’ show.

Evil-OnesI really like the way the splattered paint looks in this piece.

The speech bubbles I chose for this series of collages all come from 1950s or 1960s horror comics. This one is particularly camp, even by the standards of those comics!

We’re A Happy Family

A family portrait!

Were-A-Happy-FamilyThis is probably my favourite of all the canvas pieces I’ve done. It has considerable personal meaning – the Octopus Boy is me (I like octopii and have a couple of octopus-themed tattoos) and the Tank Girl is my wife, who at the time I created this piece was heavily pregnant.

Our son is represented by the “transparent man” at the bottom, because he was only partly-formed when this was created.

Our two cats – both passed on now, sadly – are represented by the owl (Callie looked like an owl) and the little Tintin figures (the other cat’s name was Tintin).

You may notice us gazing adoringly at them, worshiping them almost. Cats expect nothing less, of course, but boy did they get a shock when they saw how we doted on the tiny human instead of them!

 

Music Of The Spheres

aka “The Crowd Pleaser”

Music-Of-The-Spheres-01I have a troubled relationship with this piece. On one hand it’s got psychedelic circles and great symmetry and a Ganesha, so I should love it unequivocally. On the other hand it feels like it lacks a certain weirdness and is a bit cuter that I’m comfortable with.

It sold quickly when I first showed it and the buyers are good friends of mine. I could have sold it about 3 times that night actually. Maybe that’s why I resent this piece, too many people wanted to buy this one and not enough wanted to buy the others.

Typical artist, always looking for the “glass is half empty” angle!

Welcome To The Jungle

We’ve got fun and games!

welcome-to-the-jungle-01It’s rare these days for me to combine photographs and illustrations but these 1970s people are nicely colour-saturated and look almost like illustrations. This is quite an old piece, probably mid-1990s.

We are not really as aloof from the rest of the animal kingdom as we might like to think. These poor people in a prehistoric forest are about to find that out the hard way!