A PIECE FOR REVOK

This is a piece I’ve worked on over the past 3 (maybe 4) weekends for my good friend Revok. I need to be honest – after the really killer pieces Berst pulled out for Revok last month I found myself motivated to bring my A-game and rock something super detailed too (feeling left out haha). I haven’t really painted many other peoples names during my time writing but this is actually the 3rd Revok piece I’ve done. When you meet an artist that you really admire and they give you the time of day – it’s truly humbling and inspiring thing. When that artist becomes a friend who time and time again goes out on a limb for you – sticks up for you and just seems to be staunchly in your corner – there’s no way to explain that feeling. I’ve never asked or expected that type of support from anyone – not even my crew. I’ve always allowed the people around me to be as neutral as they want when it comes to me because I am a fairly polarizing person and I know that about myself. This is the best way for me to express my gratitude – through a painting I had a lot of fun as well as challenges creating.

I’m not sure if people have noticed I have a particular style of shading that I have been doing for the last year or so – it generally involves using the Astro cap half pressure – creating a dissipated splatter, almost like a half tone effect when you look at it up close. It was a slow process but fulfilling for me when viewed up close. That’s the thing – it was completely redundant in a photo and was really becoming an exercise in absolute futility. Even still I was fixated with it as a technique and not ready to let it go. I was always a fast painter so people around me were getting vexed as to why I was becoming the slowest on the wall.

June last year Rime (the next person due a really nice piece I think!) randomly gave me a blaster cap to play around with. I put it in my jacket pocket and forgot about it completely until about a month ago. It was funny – I pulled it out at our studio and explained what it was, everyone gathered around marveling over it like it was the holy grail. We went outside and I did that ‘A’ you can see off to the side of my piece. We all got really excited – I did a second ‘A’. Berst told Snek to turn it into a ‘LA’ and he crossed the line too high, we all were giving him shit. I did some random splatter and then Berst was like “You could do that shading you’ve been doing with this”. It was a total lightening bolt moment.

So this Revok piece is almost completely shaded with a blaster cap. It’s the only one I know of here in NZ – it’s looking a little used and abused right now but I am addicted to this technique. It has so much substance, grit and texture. You can literally run your hand across this wall and feel the paint. I love it.

So yeah. I’ve uploaded this nice and big, download it and have a look up close at the details!

INSPIRATION – PROCESS – PRODUCT

A while ago I painted this piece to give as an exclusive for a small 1 page segment about colour theory in Infamous magazine. I spoke in brief about my approach to colour at the time – which was going through two phases: one that drew from the random arrangement found in crystal formations. The second was drawing inspiration from the natural environment around me – the places I find sentimental like the West Coast of Auckland.

Here is an example of how I have started doing this. The piece is about 5 months old so certain aspects of the Diamondism approach to letter treatment have resolved themselves since this one but I do love the way the colours and textures of my favourite places are present in this work. Click on it to see or download it in a bigger size and analyze for yourself!

URBAN DEVELOPMENT x ORCON GREAT BLEND

This is a video diary made of a recent collaboration between myself and renown New Zealand painter Karl Maughan for an event called the Orcon Great Blend which took place at Auckland’s Civic Wintergarden on Friday Night (10.09.10).

It was a project truly in the spirit of what Urban development was initially set up to achieve and so it’s something I’m really thankful for organiser Russell Brown for instigating. I would say if you haven’t attended one of these nights before then look out for the next one! It was really exciting for me to be able to share my work with a range of Auckland creatives – many people in attendance were people I admire a lot personally so it was also really humbling.

The collaboration itself was a lot of fun – a little last minute as you can see as we started only a couple of days before the event. I got to learn a lot about Karl’s processes and also realised we had a lot of common ground despite working in really different fields of painting. I guess one conclusion I came to was the only real difference was likely a slight generational one as I’m almost certain had Karl grown up in my era he would have gravitated towards painting in spray paint! By the end of the video you can see how fearless he was with the medium.