Generally speaking, 95% of everything is bullshit... ummm, except that that must logically include the comment that "95% of everything is bullshit" which would imply that everything is 90.25% not bullshit which might imply that it is possibly some other sort of shit like horseshit, or llamashit, or, most likely, the sort of shit I'm spouting here...(This would make me not a Bullshit Artist as is often asserted in certain circles but possibly a Horse or Llamashit Artist... I prefer Bullshit Artist myself because I try to make art which is a direct response to the bullshit I see all around me!) Anyway, of the 5% that's left over (which is also 95% bullshit) I have a preference for: •Art Thingies of a satirical and subversive nature. •Wild places. •Skateboards (although I should know better at my age...). •Loud guitars. •Tree frogs. •Shouting at the tele. •Rooting for the underdog (in the figurative sense). •Making a difference...
Music
The best of every genre from cheesy pop to reggae to aforementioned loud guitars and all points in between.
Movies
Team America, Curse of the Were Rabbit, Busty Backdoor Nurses...etc
An early "Toadscape", the name I coined for this series of works that feature real, dead, flat, dry, stinky cane toads as found in huge numbers on the roads of North Queensland, peeled off the bitumen, glued to artboard and slopped with paint to tell some little narrative or rip the piss out of someone famous.
Television
as we know it IS the root of all evil. That said, I still like the 5% which isn't mind-numbing, soul-destroying crap, like Ren and Stimpy, Ripping Yarns, Fawlty Towers, Little Britain.
This is a traditional/digital hybrid work about the shameful treatment Australia (and most of the western world) is guilty of in turning away or locking up "boat people" seeking asylum. Beneath the chocolate box aesthetics of this little parable is a simple role reversal where Aussie refugees fleeing a hypothetical holocaust are facing a dose of their own kharma.
Books
The Great Shark Hunt, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, William Gibson, Woman at the Edge of Time, 1984, Raw Magazine, Captain Goodvibes.
Say it with a Paki accent. One of my more successful (read: less unsuccessful) T-shirt designs.
Heroes
Ralph Steadman, Sigmund Freud.
This isn't Ralph or Sigmund but the fat little sailor from my "Pissing Into The Wind" sculpture. This piece is a functional windvane and so it doesn't matter which way the wind is blowing he's still pissing into it. It is about the curious human propensity for futile obstinacy in the face of predictable negative consequence. Witness Iraq, Vietnam and just about every other conflict in history. It is usually a measure of how far we have yet to evolve from the animal to fulfill our potential as fully human. I don't think we'll survive the transition myself. Conversely, it is also the stuff of real heroism against insurmountable odds and the battle of the underdog against oppression... as exemplified by the fact that I can't show the bottom half here because it's got a willie in it.... Art as self-fulfilling prophesy or what.
Actually, I bet both Ralph and Sigmund could relate to this one...
Contrary to appearances, I am never very comfortable blowing my own trumpet. (I generally prefer it when someone else blows my trumpet... and anyway I'm more of a plank spanker - that's "stringed-instrument player or guitarist" in muso-speak - and so I'm more comfortable spanking my plank than trying to blow my own trumpet coz I buggered my neck a few years back and it's not so flexible any more... but I digress). ...If I've got it right, the images hereabouts blow my trumpet better than I can, or those at my other .. galleries (where I can mostly put up the uncensored image free of the fear of the neocon thought-police).
The hopefully-appropriately named deviantART is currently hosting a selection of my more provocative artworks (but you have to be a signed in member to view the rude ones), or the same now on flickr till they get the chop, or my original gallery site Toadscape.com, which is well out of date but covers my earlier stuff, or lostateminor.com and a selection of some of my more recent S+D+S pieces can be scoped on my Artworker's Alliance page. Just do a browse for my name.
My first attempt at a myspace page disappeared without trace presumably because it had some pix which had tits and bums in them. Kinda ironic and hypocritical when you consider the whole myspace phenomenon seems to be one giant virtual kinky sex knocking-shop. I have quite a few paintings and sculptures about sex which I would love to display here but which would be so totally obscured with "Censored" Stickers they would be unrecognisable. Such an enlightened age we are living in...
I have a crack at lots of different creative stuff which I like to lump collectively under the universal term: "Art Thingies".
My "Sex and Death ...and shopping" Art Thingies tend to feature observations upon such junk culture icons as your airbrushed, bottle blonde Hollywood bimbo being dissected with her own credit card, your cadaverous zombie staggering about with a broken television strapped to its face or your aerial view of a giant shopping trolley trundling inexorably down an abandoned highway straight over a crumbling precipice. The trolley is full of the whole of humanity from the dawn of man at the bottom to life-as-we-know-it at the top living out a microcosmic tableau of all that we seem to be about today built upon the stacked layers of our collective history and all oblivious to the bleeding obvious about to happen when the trolley goes over the edge. I would probably call this one, Giant Shopping Trolley of the Apocalypse....
And so these Art Thingies might be summed up thus:
Serendipity and Nihilism in equal measures.
The sizeable grey area between -anthropisms: Mis and Phil.
The ostensibly nebulous nexus between sexuality and environment.
Jaundiced though hopefully pithy observations upon politics, society, mass media and the human condition in this glorious new millenium.
Satirical and sardonic celebrations of all that is stupid, ignorant, arrogant, hypocritical, cynical, gullible, bigotted, shallow and (he added self-deprecatingly) self-righteous.
I am trying, in my own small way, to fulfill one the supposed aims of art:- to hold up a mirror to the society that spawns it.
This is another Toadscape. It is dedicated to the glory of God and the literal truth of the Old Testament. Apparently, this is yet another piece of mine that has been mercilessly plagiarised. Not only that, but it was copied, without my permission, over 500 years before I painted it by some amateur dabbler on the roof of this old barn or something, in Italy of all places. Apparently...
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Who I'd like to meet: Artists (and audiences) that don't believe the hype... that try to point out the bleedin' obvious to those that take Fox News as Gospel and Gee Dubya Boosh as Saviour in the Holy War Against Badness. The CIA can intercept my personal communications at gvnryn@yahoo.com.au
"Cherub of the Neocon". Copper and Fibreglass
Sex & Death ...and shopping's Friend Space (Top 28)
Un peu de pub au passage : Extases de Femmes est un recueil de nouvelles érotiques écrites par des femmes, dont moi-même... J'ai également mis des extraits de textes non publiés sur ma page. N'hésitez pas y jeter un oeil ! Merci !
