I am quite into Brontë Naylor’s interesting public art, I find her art quite fascinating in general, she can be found on https://bronte-naylor.com/ and I think she is a very solid practitioner in that she does a lot of research before setting out on her murals. Some of the heavyweights of mural art also include Lisa King who is heading to art school to shed the mural art moniker and head into the fine arts realm. I feel that is a good move for anyone really. My youngest has started at NAS (National Art School) in Sydney suburb Darlinghurst at the same time as Lisa King, what a great way to start art school along with a lot of talented artists. I believe the emphasis on the observational drawing is the school’s strength, they do observational drawing and general drawing as separate subjects, which is great in my opinion. My own knowledge of observational drawing is from a lot of practice in the past, I was always told that observational drawing was the foundation you needed so I put years into it. I still do observational drawing here and there, and I like doing it but I am more interested in line work these days. Also, I am not too fussed about detailed drawings and normally stick to broad colour studies if I do observational artwork.

I never had a traditional education in observational drawing and it is pretty rare these days anyway, my ex-partner got that knowledge after finishing her initial art study and her drawing really got to another level leaving me behind. My own understanding of drawing is partially taught and self-taught as well. I suppose I just tried to find the best solution in a drawing I could at the time, I still have my original drawings from art school and some life drawing work as well. A friend who has had a good founding in traditional drawing told me that my style of drawing was quite distinct and unlike any he had seen, at least as far as observational drawing goes. My general drawing is quite like Stanley William Hayter’s work from the Modernist abstraction period with the customary graffiti street art influence but my observational drawing is different again. I rarely do observational drawing with graphite but I do it a lot with spray paint and have worked on walls with reference work and spray cans, mapping the layered references with different coloured cans and then finishing the work as a reference graffiti hybrid. 

So to recap, I draw and paint observationally occasionally, I draw in a postmodernist/post-graffiti slant and do observational drawing/painting with spray cans. So three distinct approaches not including the work I do in video art and sound art. None of this is in any galleries or important collections, just ephemera on internet platforms and I think I really have my work cut out for me with current fashions in art being diametrically opposed to my own practice. I basically spent decades working towards being an artist from decades ago. Oh well, at least I am still able to make art and have an audience on the street and online. Most importantly I am still motivated, as I said to a friend recently, I spend a lot of time dreaming about visual art especially if I have tried to avoid it. I am hounded by my own failures but they tell me to keep going, oh the irony.