Every now and then things fall perfectly into place. A week or so ago I had some inspiration and could see some new work on the horizon. It started when I watched a documentary on Frank Stella and Kenneth Taylor making the large scale print ‘The fountain’. The piece is amazing in its own right but the difficult lengthy process of preparing the piece for printing is phenomenal. So it made me think, what could I be doing better to push the boundaries of my own art? At first I did a small mock up with paper, aerosol and a printing style application. It got me thinking. What could I do on boards or walls with print style techniques? Soon enough I tried some small boards and that is when I hit something interesting. Then I thought, can I add to this? Of course, the next problem for me is a Rauschenberg one. When I was in high school I was obsessed with Rauschenberg but I couldn’t even pronounce his name. It was all pictures in books for me. I never knew how to say his name until I went to university. When I went to Sydney Uni for an interview they asked me about him, and I was like who? That didn’t go very well I suppose considering that I had been emulating his art through the last two years of high school. Now I am revisiting those high school days, as well as tagging, ephemera, textures from buildings, the list goes on.

As I am getting older I have been heading back to core interests from the past, basically the stuff I left behind. Now that stuff finally comes full circle with other skills acquired to create what is a cumulative set of work. The journey has only just begun. Yet it began walking the streets so many decades ago as a teenager taking in the urban environment and in my own little way trying to curate some of it. I have described tagging as a heartbeat. The accumulation of tags, a symphony of modern classical. All of the ephemera and accumulation of addition and subtraction of sanctioned and unsanctioned work becomes the process for art. Some of it inspired, mundane, aspirational or like a cacophonic beat. It accumulates with so many lives crossing paths. Sometimes though when I see things coming together, I go a little quiet. I head inward before heading outward. I now have a lot of work ahead. I used some techniques on a new work and my friend found his own answer to my additions. It seems so obvious now. On walls it is only a textural addition, a lot of the same rules apply. It reminds me of work I did in the 90s. Now it seems everything old is new again.