A TOUR OF THE STUDIO

I've been working on this one for a while. It started turning out so different from any paintings I had done before. I started this painting early this year and I work on it at least once a week. I'd be surprised I I ever finish it.

This started as a weird play with throwing ink around. After you throw things around they begin to talk to you kind of like a Rorschach inkblot used by psychologists and psychiatrists. In a similar way I quickly started to notice hidden meanings in this one. I see a bunny's face caressed by a hand which brings back the memory of my deceased pet rabbit. He died when I was about 10 or something and was my first experience of death.


These works are a stereo-painting in development and they have been in development for months. Almost every line takes a day to dry and it's a very calculated and tight approach. They need to differ slightly so that they are looking at the subject from slightly different angles. This work is a long way off.



I usually have a bit of paint left on my brush and on my palette. I also usually have a big mirror next to me and so I do a quick self portrait with what I have. This is the last two.

Progress Update - This Little Piggy

I'm sculpting this out of paint - granted I started with a ceramic model.

PHILOSOPHY WITH TONY

I'm working on a project called This Little Piggy which is a group exhibition. I'm having to plunge the depths of my relationships to pigs. I suppose the strongest relationship to pigs is my love for bacon, pork and ham but beyond that I draw a blank.

I am to make a work somehow drawing inspiration to a ceramic piggy bank. I have tendencies to make a gory scene with the piggy as some kind of reference to manufactured animals but it would all be coming from a John Berger book that I've been reading. I also thought about putting $5,000 in it and seeing if anyone would steal it. I'd sell the artwork for $5,025 + commission. But where would I get $5,000 from?

Other associations with pigs are that they're greey. Piggy + bank = money greedy? Money greedy translates in this day and age as the cause of the global recession or GFC, the cause of international slavery, the cause of climate change, the cause of wars and conflicts and probably a lot more. In World War Two Nazis were referred to as pigs. The term pig is also used to refer to Police and also chauvinists.

But piggy banks always look friendly. The funny thing is pigs actually have very little to do with the evolution of the piggy bank. The term piggy bank actually refers to the type of clay that they were initially made from "pygg".

This inquiry into piggy banks is like Plato's world of ideas. He believed that the essenses of everything lived in a seperate world from ours. In our world, objects exist as an approximation of what they are in the world of ideas. For example if you ask yourself what a table is the answer might be something with four legs and a flat bit you can put things on. But really that could be a chair or a bed or a dog depending on how you argue it. Also you might find that some tables only have three legs and aren't necessarily like every other tables. You might notice that piggy banks are the same.

Majapahit Piggy Bank

But it would be a little boring of me to try and transform the piggy bank and make it "different". The correct thing to do is to make it "better". What makes a piggy bank special is its mystery. The most interesting thing about any piggy bank is trying to detect the full value of the jingle jangle.

Will someone lend me $5,000?

Click here to download the magic and mystery of the Piggy Bank

STUDYING THE PIGGY

Costume Dramas

Photos courtesy of Jodie Barker.

Loving Bababa International