It is new years day in Sydney 2022. I am hopefully getting some holidays soon. As a lot of people are getting Covid at work I may have my holidays delayed though. I had to stand for six hours the other day in a queue for a test as a colleague at work tested positive for Covid. I know a lot of people with Covid who are in isolation. Thankfully most people are fine and are not too sick. I feel like I found a good direction in my drawing the past few months. I have tried to lift a few cues from other artists. I feel like adding negative space and hinting at patterns within forms gives the work weight (as in dark contrasting with light tones) and dimension in a flat perspective. Something I try to avoid now with graffiti is anything that is too centred around contained lines. Most graffiti sticks to contained forms. I like seeing it done well but I want to avoid it. Mainly to differentiate what I do from a lot of the graffiti done in Sydney.

Some graffiti concentrates on following lines that are like cartoons. Yet if you look at cartoons and early graffiti in New York it didn’t always have an enclosed feel. For example, lines found their way around the form but weight found its way into other elements not just through shadows. This is more obvious in cartoon figures but there were embellishments in the letterforms as well. These would add dimension to the flat panel and make the work dynamic. Some of this dimension could have just been dirt and the fact some panels in New York had been running for months before they were photographed, the film used to document the work and maybe mistakes under pressure. There were definitely spontaneous considerations in execution centred around many factors. I am not trying to emulate this but find ways to add the dimension to a space that is flat.

I was watching some of the classic martial arts movies from the Wu-Tang collection, it is made for a younger audience and was known to inspire the Hip Hop group Wu-Tang Clan. It is pretty amusing and quite entertaining. It came up on my Youtube suggestions as I have a lot of martial arts stuff come up. Well, I am going to spend the next few days relaxing, today I will go to Tai Ji later this afternoon. I have been updating some computers, if I get holidays I have a few things I need to do. I may get some computer parts if I get a holiday then head up to Katoomba to do a little bit of paint preparation.