Flowers at mum's

A candidate for the Museum of Fleas - but it may not be finished in time

[it wasn't ready in time, or at least I didn't pick it up from Newcastle(its still there)

 

Finished - This is a daylight shot but there's quite a bit of UV pigment in this

 

 

I forgot to take the fluoro pink paint when I visited mum over the weekend - arrgh disaster;) - and was only there for about a day. It was too wet and unfinished to travel afterwards.

I may have one last chance to finish it before the show, if I go there again in a fortnight

 

Photographed with my 395nm strip light

 

A sort of mash up of some the garden and potted flowers at my mothers place in Newcastle. Like with a lot of the things I'm doing right now, as I work towards the Museum of Fleas in September, I'm experimenting a bit using UV pigments mixed with my usual oil paints, though I haven't had much of a look at this one under a blacklight  - It should definitely emit under UV tho!

When I'm up there again in a couple of weeks I'll do more to it and get a shot under my UV LED strip

Black cockatoos

 

4 big yellow tailed black cockatoos that visit mum's place in Warabrook(Newcastle NSW) to eat some sunflower seeds.

Usually they are very secretive, coming mostly at dawn, and leaving at any sign of activity, even indoors, but the other day they weren't worried at all as I set up a camera and took photos of them for half an hour.

Maybe I'll do a painting based on  theses, UV?

 

Plague Bacteria clog a flea's foregut

A piece for the Museum of Fleas. Hot pink fluoro plague bacteria(Yersinia Pestis), covered with their patent yellow slime, clog the gut of a flea so when attempting to feed, can only vomit up these icky buggers

 

Finished or close, this shot under my UV striplight, the one immediately below under daylight

 

Under UV light

 

Thanks to the technicians who got the electron microdraph this is drawn from. This is a daylight shot,

Ashleigh Cummings

 

tattoo

Ashleigh starred in the remake of Puberty Blues. She's a lovely young actor doing a lot of work and travel. Thanks to Julie O'Brien for the photo of the drawing. Julie's an old friend and collector who thinks Ashleigh would be a great portrait subject for a certain prize and organised for us to meet and do the drawing 

She'd just from a Vogue shoot where the make up artist gave her a bit of temporary  face  tattoo, They wouldn't let her do it herself, thought she'd be too wild. I'd been painting figtrees by a housing commission tower in Waterloo

Dog Flea

Another Museum of Fleas painting. I'm also thinking of how to make a mold for a papier mache mask of this fellow. The painting doesn't do justice yet to the fleas stylish, uncrushable  Elizabethan armour of ruffs and frills.

Its lairy with a spiky fur coat on - I'll put it aside to see if it makes the cut for the Museum of Fleas

 

Under daylight

                                                                                                                        

 

Woof

Jon the Pom's legendary birthday bash, 2019 edition

 

Jon Pom's 55th birthday celebration. This is the 6th year I've followed him and the gang around on a Chippendalian pubcrawl. drawing a book of portrait birthday cards.

Last year's bash is here I'll put links to all 6 here and/or on a separate page soon. They can be found among posts from July each year on the blog

This is the frontispiece, in the back yard at the Duck Inn, with Jon and Vasko providing commentary, and a glimpse of Rosie on the left drawing me - see below.

Graham, aka Crash, one of Jon's mates from his roadying days

 

On the bck of a napkin... Rosie's drawing of me

 

Vasko - the Mayor of Chippendale, or so he alleges

 

Rosemary - Chippendale artist Wart

There was some confusion as we upped sticks at the Duck Inn and moved on to the Lansdowne, and Wart left before I managed to draw any more than this

 

Gracie

Grace collaborated with me on the RocknRoll Garden of Earthly Delights at the Record Crate and the Australiana Billabong at Newtown Mission

 

Fragments of Lucas - other years I've drawn some really good likenesses of Lucas. This year, not so much

 

Emma at the Lansdowne

Jon the Birthday Day boy. Back at the Duck Inn he set his hair on fire blowing out the candles on his(lurid food-colour rainbow) cake. "Happy Birthday" - we'd just launched into the song and he was jumping the gun. Spectacular.

 

Dommie was working the Bar at the Lansdowne. He's into 80s metal, and id putting together a house band at the hotel, which he's fronting. Bowie Spiders from Mars glam would be mad right now

 

Dan 

By now we'd moved on down to Bar Broadway and I got a better portrait of Dan than I've managed before

 

Max, and his haircut( I had this haircut once upon a time, but it escaped, and now Max has it).

Max is on the staff at Bar Broadway

Stan at Bar Broadway

 

Jake, another barman at Bar Broadway, and friend of Jon's, he knows everyone down there.

This is a detail, the whole page is below. It was about 3am and I was getting tired. A bit earlier finish than some other years(last year I was mercifully refused entry to the Agincourt about 4)