Sunny loving, happened so fast

Hi, here's some new ceramic sculptures of everyone's favourite icy treat that they actually stopped making last year but you can still find in some milk bars; the Sunny-boy.

I photographed the ceramic Sunny-boys here in sunny St. Kilda, on top of my wooden esky sculpture, with a couple of real life sunny boys going for a run in the background.  

And here I am away from the beach, with four of the Sunny-boys hanging on my studio wall.

Amazingly, I was commissioned to make these Sunny-boy sculptures for the great Peter Oxley, AKA the bass player in the awesome Australian band the Sunnyboys!!!

And so yeah, super exciting, here's a photo of Peter alongside his brother and Sunnyboys bandmate Jeremy. I'm told this photo was taken in Newtown in Sydney in 1980, (apparently back then Sunny-boys were only 20 cents!), and best of all the photo shows Peter holding an actual Sunny-boy.

And now, here's Pete just last week, holding my Sunny-boy sculpture.

It's so cool to be able to compare the two images of Peter and the Sunny-boy, separated in time by almost four decades!

A huge thank you to Pete's partner, Heidi Jackson, for organising this commission. Heidi is also a stellar artist herself, and I'm super thrilled to have a fantastic little painting of hers hanging in my bedroom. 

Here's a photo I took of Heidi's painting while standing in the middle of the road.

And you can (and should!) check out more of Heidi's paintings by clicking here.

As well as Heidi, I also wanna say a big thanks to Peter for his support, and also a big thanks to Melbourne filmmaker Emmy Clifton for helping me document the Sunny-boy sculptures.

Lastly of course a big thanks to the band the Sunnyboys for all their music. And in exciting news, the Sunnyboys will be performing live this February 2nd at the Melbourne Zoo as part of the concert series of Music Against Wildlife Extinction. For more info on that click here.

So yeah, looking forward to the zoo next year, and in the meantime if you're desperate for a Sunny-boy fix then you're in luck because earlier today I spotted this Razz Rasberry flavoured six pack, all yours for just $2.99, still currently available in the PAST DATED section at the Foodworks in Flemington.

Oh boy, oh boy. Thanks heaps for reading, I hope you're having a particularly sunny day, and to finish up here's one of my very favourite Sunnyboys songs. It's called Happy Man, it's from 1981 and if possible my hot tip is that it's best played at full volume while driving to the beach. Or the zoo. Or Flemington Foodworks.

Somewhere over the rainbow paddlepop

Hi, here's seven new little ceramic sculptures I was commissioned to make for the Melbourne Town Hall art collection.

I was going to photograph them in my studio but the weather was nice so I decided to go for a walk around the block and photograph them in front of some flowers.

Golden Gaytime. Acrylic on ceramic. 20 x 7 x 4cm. 2017.

Rainbow Paddlepop. Acrylic on ceramic. 19 x 6 x 2cm. 2017.

Milko. Acrylic on ceramic. 10 x 2 x 1cm. 2017.

Redskin. Acrylic on ceramic. 10 x 2 x 1cm. 2017.

Dead horse. Acrylic on ceramic. 21.5 x 8 x 6cm. 2017.

It's a long way to the shop if you wanna sausage roll. 22 x 7 x 7cm. Acrylic on ceramic. 2017.

A saucey smile. Acrylic on ceramic. 6 x 6 x 3cm. 2017.

Dog Day Afternoon Delight

Hey, here's a quick drawing I did of an adorable, (and a-drawable), dog in the park.

Speaking of dogs, the group exhibition I was in called Every Dog Will Have It's Day has just come to a close, (held at the dog-gone Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney, curated by Sophia Cai and Kathleen Linn).

My work in the exhibition was this triptych titled "Underdog, Hotdog, Western bulldog".

The triptych consists of a big canvas painting of an underdog, a ceramic hotdog, and a ceramic sculpture of a book by now retired AFL Western Bulldogs footballer Bob Murphy. 

But my Bob Murphy book sculpture wasn't the only ceramic book I made for the exhibition because in the lead up to the opening of the show I also made this sculpture of an exhibition catalogue about another person in the show, the great Sydney based artist Anastasia Klose, from her 2011 Gertrude exhibition "I Can't Stop Living". 

Here's the sculpture photographed in my backyard.

Did you know that apparently in the Middle Ages when we needed some copying done we couldn't just go to Officeworks? Instead, there were Monks whose job it was to individually reproduce manuscripts by hand.

I'm reading a great book at the moment all about the history of libraries and it says that supposedly these Monks believed "The very act of copying out texts by forming each letter and each stroke by hand was itself an act of observance and devotion". 

I really like that quote because it's definitely how I feel when painting away on a lot of my sculptures, like the inside cover of this ceramic Anastasia Klose catalogue. 

Anyway though, at the end of the day I guess it's all just a bit of Monk-y business 

And here's a photo from the opening of Anastasia and I, standing in front of both our work.

In other exciting news, I've got three drawings in an exhibition that's just opened at the Melbourne Town Hall Gallery. The show is all about the decline of the newspaper industry, and it's titled Ink in the blood: The life of Melbourne's newspapers.

The exhibition is curated by Andrew Stephens, a former journalist for the The Age newspaper, and the show's on until to February 17th, 2018. Which means, just like if you were holding a stack of newspapers, you've got Ages.

And in really fantastic news, the City of Melbourne have acquired all three of my drawings in this exhibition for the Victorian state collection. 

Here's one of the drawings, titled 'five people on the train reading The Age'.

Other than that, just two blocks up the road, is the group exhibition I'm in about Artist Books at the State Library of Victoria, which is still on until November 12. The feedback for this show has been seriously amazing so please check that out too if you can!

And the last thing to mention for today is that I'm super thrilled to be a finalist in the upcoming 2017 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, opening on the spooky day of this Friday the 13th. So if you're in Sydney at the end of the week then please join me for the exhibition opening, here's your invitation;

In the meantime though I hope you're having a nice week, being kind to others and being kind to yourself. And finally, here's a ceramic sculpture I made of a Rainbow Paddlepop.