Back in 2006 I did a series of illustrations for William Blake’s poem The Tyger which Roger Whitson over at Zoomorphosis recently wrote an excellent post about. Since my website where they used to be hosted is still down pending a serious redesign, I thought I’d post them here; I think they still hold up fairy well.
Here are two new paintings created for “Meet THE DEALER”, an exhibition currently running at the beautiful Gallery285 in Sydney. It’s open for another week, so if you’d like to see these works in the flesh, as well as pieces from 5 other young artists, get down to 285 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst before the 5th March.
My mum likes to tell people that I was the only child she knew who could look at lambs playing in the field and think of lamb chops. When I announced age 21 that I was becoming a vegetarian she was incredulous. I’ve always been fascinated by animals, and as a result fairly good at drawing them. On the internet I’ve discovered thousands of people who share my fascination, and endless email forwards about tigers adopting piglets, and youtube videos of unlikely animals engaging in mortal combat. These drawings are my response to the strange symbiosis of cruelty and kindness, beauty and horror that exist in this thing we call nature. All of my animals are drawn life size, and I research those which are extinct as carefully as possible so that the anatomy (if not the colours) are reasonably accurate.
These are a few mini animal lovers, each one is about 10cm x 15cm, pen and ink and acrylic on canvas.
Mummies, equally incomprehensible and not yet convincingly explained, stare at us from the remote past as if they held some magic secret. Various peoples knew the technique of embalming corpses, and archaeological finds favour the supposition that prehistoric beings believed in return to a second life, i.e. a corporeal return… Drawings and sagas actually indicated that the ‘gods’ promised to return from the stars in order to awaken the well-preserved bodies to new life.
Erich Von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods
