Ink Dots Black Spots

Once again I have neglected my blog, and as with my last post I have dusted off my keyboard to tell you about a group art show I have a piece in. This time it’s a Melbourne based show conceived by lovely local artist Simple Sime, involving 50 artists from 15 different tattoo studios around Australia and New Zealand. All artists were instructed to create a piece of art in plain black ink on white, which would then be screen-printed by Dangerfork for the exhibition.  A limited edition of 20 signed and numbered prints per piece will be for sale, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Cancer Council of Victoria. An impressive list of the artists involved  and other relevant details can be found on the website here.

I really enjoyed the challenge of creating a piece without the smooth gradients I usually employ to give depth and tone. I’ve always wanted to try plain ink work for the purpose of screen-printing, but have shied away from it for that very reason – I still think I’m better at drawing and painting in my usual style, but I think having tried this method I’ll experiment with it some more. I will happily admit to being strongly influenced by gorgeous poster artist David D’Andrea with this piece, one of my favourite illustrators whose prints I have hanging both at home and above my bench at the tattoo studio. As he works almost exclusively with black ink I thought of his posters often for much needed guidance. 

(click to enlarge)

The concept was something I’d been planning for a while, and that I felt could be re-imagined fairly well for a detailed, line-heavy drawing. Passionflowers are by far my favourite flower and a treasured herb in my personal pharmacopeia. I fell in love with them after their gentle sedative effects saved me from crippling anxiety as a teenager, and have used them ever since (though these days it’s mostly for insomnia). They are truly beautiful and amazing flowers, rather like strange organic space ships…and as if that weren’t enough, they also give us sweet, delicious passionfruit! For some reason I can’t discern, I’m infatuated with portraying fruits that have been torn open by birds, exposing their flesh and seeds. So…without wanting to delve too deep into what that’s all about, that’s how my disorganised ideas about those things managed to become a halfway organised drawing.

Some close-ups of the detail in the flowers and nest:

 

Hopefully some of you will like the print  (or someone else’s) enough to buy one and help out a worthy cause. The exhibition opens on Thursday August 16th at The Vic Bar in Abbotsford, and all prints are reasonably priced at $60. Would be great to see some of you there.

La Louve art prints.

Limited edition of 23, up now on the Lepus Luna website if anyone’s interested. AUD$160 shipping included.

Lepus Luna

So if you've noticed that I haven't been posting here as much of late, that would be because I've been busily working on an exciting new project with my husband Shaun, which we've named Lepus Luna. Motivated in part by the desire to spend more of our time working together from home, as well as by the numerous requests we've received for prints of our respective paintings and photographs, Lepus Luna will be a mutable space that can accommodate whatever we're working on at any given time, either individually or together. This is our brand new logo!

The most significant move we've made towards getting this thing off the ground is the purchase of a large-format digital printer that is capable of reproducing artworks and photographs at museum quality standards - commonly known as giclée printing. Not only will this make it possible for us to make our personal art available to people, it will eventually give us the opportunity to help other artists we know and admire to make prints of their work as well. With the photo-editing skills and printing knowledge that Shaun's been gaining at his photography course, he's able to achieve printed results that are as close to the original artwork as possible, which has always been a challenge for me in the past.

As we are both still working full time, progress with this thing is going to be slow, but we plan to have our first print available before Christmas this year - a very limited edition of my painting from earlier this year called La Louve, signed and numbered with some hand-painted gold detailing. Check out our new blog and follow by RSS, or like our facebook page if you're keen to get updates on prints and other things we're doing.  Cheers!