My mate Bill

I saw my mate Bill this week on the way into town and he gave me a couple of pictures to scan for him. Bill's originally from the Tiwi Islands, which are about 100km north of Darwin - but he lives just down the road and it's always good to bump into him. His artwork can be truly mesmerising and each one of them is deeply significant to Bill and his people.

Bill's right up there in my list of The Most Interesting People I Know - apart from his traditional paintings, he also paints fridges and plays a mean cigar-box ukelele. Bill's off to Darwin for a couple of weeks but when he returns, we're going to sit down, have a bit of a yarn and put a couple of posts together on Bill and some of the work he does. In the meantime, here's a couple of Bills paintings for your viewing pleasure.

The Matchbox Show

This is such a cool thing to be a part of. Now showing at the Noosa Regional Gallery is an on-going, ever-growing world-wide exhibition called 'The Matchbox Show'. Conceived and curated by one of the teachers at my art college, Michael Ciavarella, The Matchbox Show is a collection of small ceramic artworks that have to fit inside a matchbox. The first exhibition, held in Gulgong, NSW (the town on the old 10 dollar bill) featured 150 individual works, and now with the Noosa exhibition including many more,  it appears that Michael is well on his way to achieving his goal of a collection of 5000 matchboxes to be featured at the International Ceramics Conference in Finland in 2014. 

My first contribution to The Matchbox Show was actually a severed finger - complete with cotton wool and plenty of blood - but someone had already done that, so it was back to the drawing board.  I went instead for a lawn bowls theme- the piece is called 'Jack High'.

I've been doing some sketch studies of lawn bowlers recently and have been spending a bit of time down at the Maroochydore Swans Bowls Club. I've become a big fan of lawn bowls - it's definitely the sport for me: I can smoke, drink beer and not have to exert myself beyond rolling a bowl across the grass. For more info on the show, go to The Matchbox Show  and to find out more about the very talented and ridiculously accomplished Michael Ciavarella - check out his website

The Back of Beyonce

We have a uniquely Australian saying to describe the outback, or the inland of Australia: The Back of Beyond. A mysterious and remote desert area that is still sometimes nostalgically remembered  as The Never Never. I spent some time out there years ago and have always been struck by how sensual the Australian landscape is - especially out The Back of Beyond. I'd been wanting to paint an Australian landscape for some time, and while sketching out some rock formations they began to take on a female form. From there, especially with the play on words, it was a pretty easy jump for The Back of Beyond to become The Back of Beyonce.

 'The Back of Beyonce', acrylic on stretched canvas, 180cm x 60cm. AUD$2300. Freight charges as applicable.

Modi's the man

My very real love affair with art history has led me to the wonderful Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Modi is my new main man: a rollicking, boozing, mad bastard who lived his art and lived like artists used to. He was good mates with Pablo Picasso (my until now main man), yet these two giants of their time maintained a blistering, sometimes violent rivalry until Modi succumbed to tuberculosis - brought on by his serious drinking, his equally serious and on-going enjoyment of hashish, his work rate and his grinding poverty. Spending a lot of time frequenting 'disreputable parts of the city', Modi embraced the underbelly way in much the same way that Toulouse-Lautrec (my all time main man) had done in Montmartre years before. Despite dying penniless, Modigliani's time to show 'em all did come - albeit a bit late to make much difference to him: his La Belle Romaine (1917) made a new record for his work in a 2010 New York auction. How much you say? How about US$68.9 million...

Sketches from your photos...

My portraits and sketches are mostly done from photos that have been emailed to me. If you've got a photo you think might work as a sketch, just send it through and I'll give you a price by reply email. I normally do these sketches on A4 190gsm watercolour paper and they start from about AUD$120. Sketches are delivered unframed to allow you to frame them to suit your decor. Postage to anywhere in the world is included on all sketches or paintings on paper.

Welcome to my world.

A shameless forum for promoting the sale of my artwork - but a forum nonetheless: a place for me to record my travels and trevails with art. I'll mostly use this blog to post any new paintings or sketches as they are finished - with all the info you'll need to snap it up before someone else does, including freight to anywhere. Thanks for your interest in my work, Matt.