TateShots - John Squire on watercolour

John Squire, The Stone Roses guitarist on Patrick Heron's watercolours. A nice clip. John Squire seems like a really mellow guy. His talent with the Roses was never in question although I never cared much for any of The Seahorses stuff. I was always more of an Ian Brown fan while my friend Kev (the young one) was a Squire man through and through. Needless to say, that topic was debated quite a few times. However, we both agree his artwork is sweet.

Hello there, poor little blue guy

Hello there, St kilda

Christmas day on St Kilda Beach (or about three feet from it as this was taken) Melbourne, 2001.

All together now.... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

The Archive

I wish John Peel could have met this dude. Not only would they have been the best of friends, maybe John could have helped this poor guy out. A compelling story of one mans passion sadly coming to an end.

Hello there, wife!

Yo Yo Yo Robots!

Awesome underwater base jump/free-dive - Guillaume Nery

Hello there, Koh Tao

Sometimes I think I could have stayed there forever, although it would have killed me. Koh Tao was super nice and our first taste of island life. Oh lazy days and amazing nights. Learning to dive and meeting new people. This was about a week before the full moon party on Haad Rin Beach on the island of Koh Phangan, September 2000 I think. I absolutely love a sunset (these photos do not do it justice) and settling down with a beer on the beach and watching this every evening was heavenly. A little slice of natures splendor. Complete with some mellow, ambient tunes resonating from a little beach bar in the background. It was always an amazing start to the evenings' fun.

Koh Tao was small and remote. The closest neighbouring island was an hour away by boat. Somehow you get a strong sense of how beautiful life is, how easy it is to take the important things in life for granted when you are this far away from everything. Enjoy it as you are only here once. The possibilities are indeed infinite.

To this day, one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen and experienced was on the water just off this island as we were heading to Koh Phangan for the full moon party (yay!).
The sun looked like a big orange fireball slowly sinking into the sea on the horizon, burning the sky orange and reds as it went. On the other side of the boat, the moon on the same axis, was half visible on the opposite horizon! Rising from the sea to meet the night. And they were both so big and vibrant! It was sooo cool to see and quite a spiritual moment (but that could have been all the drugs I'd taken).

The journey back was hellish as we had stayed up and partied into the next day (and for the next few nights). The heat was unforgiving. I'd also lost my shoes as I'd buried them for safe keeping and someone dug them up. Thanks for that! (Well, it seemed like a well thought-out plan at the time haha).

Ah sweet! The footsie's up!

Layer Cake

This was my first attempt at making my own multi layered stencil. It didn't turn out too badly (but has its faults) considering I cut the image layers by eye as I did not have the luxury of owning a copy of photoshop at the time.

I ripped the original image from the net. It was a caricature of a pretty lady. I thought it could work well as a stencil and would be good practice. It has no deep meaning or message behind it. Just a visual. The original image size was tiny which made it harder to cut as the pixels were huge once I'd blown it up to a nice proportional A4. I found the actual picture of the woman later and she turned out to be not as tasty as first thought. I've seen this sort of re occurrence in the more recent stuff I've done. A beautiful looking woman doesn't always transcend into a beautiful looking stencil. And vice versa. So it's trial and error but I've learned to spot what works best, to a point. And what imagines will look bad due to lighting/contrast.

Having no place to actually paint I had little option left other than to start doing these in my lunch hour at work or not do them at all. This itself can pose a few logistical problems. The first being time or the lack of it to be precise. And the second is people. Being curious animals by nature, everyone wants to have a look at what you are doing. (This eats into your very limited time). Once people have attributed this stencil work to you, they know where it originated if they pass by it on the street. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees that this is a good thing to be doing with your spare time! The police especially.

But anyway, I love doing this and it's all about developing your skills and getting better right? And if they happen to be pasted up in the odd doorway around town. So be it. You have to go with what brings you happiness and fulfilment. Well, this does it for me.