Month: February 2016

Bothers of the Umbilical kind

Painting

My portrait of the Umbilical Brothers (David Collins and Shane Dundas) was entered in the Moran and Archibald Prize in 2016.

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In honour of their 25th anniversary as a performance duo, my portrait of the Umbilical Brothers (David Collins and Shane Dundas) celebrates their unique physicality, positivity, and longevity as artists. Lending from the form of Raphael’s 1505 painting “Madonna of the Goldfinch”, I created a joyous tableau that places the comedians among high art.

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I supplemented the faunal allegory of Raphael’s goldfinch, representing suffering, with a goldfish, representing good luck, something they have enjoyed a great deal of over the past 25 years. Also a goldfish looks funnier and is more fun to say.

Umbilical of the Goldfish - After Raphael

 

Both Shane and Dave were incredibly generous with their time, doing sittings backstage at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (where they were the first comedy show in the newly named venue) and more sittings in their hotel rooms in Melbourne during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. They are both lovely blokes and I was glad to have the opportunity to paint Dave again after my first portrait of him in 2012. Why wouldn’t you want to paint bodies as bendy as theirs filled with such electric personality.

THE MAKING OF AN ICON

Design

  

Communicating visually and being iconic.

After celebrating my three year anniversary with Jigsaw I had a looked back at some of the designs I’d created and the skills I have learnt. One of my most constant design challenges was creating simple icons that have been peppered through our presentations.

After Jigsaw had a rebrand 3 years ago by Christopher Doyle & Co. we had a clean and crisp new design direction, as part of that design Chis created about ten icons to use in our presentations with the plan for me to create more as time went on. Over the past three years I’ve been busy in Adobe Illustrator morphing the same 14pt red lines into soup cans, unicorns, anchors and basketballs. At the moment the icon count sits at 861.

  

This work has been great for my creative practice as it has taught me to think about how to communicate simply and directly while maintaining a strong aesthetic – A skill which is very valuable in cartooning. My cartoons have become clearer and more focussed which in turn has made them funnier as the reader is able to digest the joke in a shorter amount of time.

Well all this hard work has made me hungry – I’m off to make a sandwich.