The opening weekend of Skulls & Wings has been a wonderful experience for me. I received a lot of constructive criticism and enjoyed all sorts of reactions to my art. And it was good receiving positive feedback from people, whose opinions are important to me.
It seems that one of my pictures is a real favorite. It is the hummingbird. And it is already gone.
One of our friends, Timonthy James Webb came to the show. He offered to swap the humming bird for one of his paintings. I didn´t have to think twice and immediately agreed. I would have taken almost any of his paintings as I really like his art. But to my surprise he offered a painting which I had seen a few years ago at his place and had always wished to belong. They even brought me the painting the same evening. Thanks so much, Tim. I love the painting.
When I had a look at the backside of the painting I could read “Begun 1984 Finished 2010”. No surprise! Tim´s paintings often have a long story behind them. Here is what he told me about it:
“This picture has a history.
Originally, it was a biro drawing done in a sketch book in 1984. At the time I was living in Maldon at my parent’s. I was in the final year of high school. It was a black and white drawing and it had Lost in South Yarra written across the bottom. South Yarra is a suburb in Melbourne, and Lost in South Yarra was a song that we played in my first band. It was about a country boy going to Melbourne and being corrupted, we were very new wave.
In 1990, I was living in Prahran, Melbourne and my house was flooded in a rain storm. All of my sketch books where soaked, and I had to tear out the pages I could save and dry them out. This was one of them.
For some reason I glued them all into another book, with some really strong industrial glue called Liquid Nails. I was in a group show in 1991 and this book and others like it that I had glued together were in the show. The title and theme of the show was Artists make books.
When I was home at my parent’s about 5 years ago, I think it was 2006, I found the book in the shed. It was in really bad condition and not worth keeping.It smelt pretty bad and had been eaten by something, but I took it back to Munich with me anyway. Happy I had found it.
In 2010, I was looking through the drawings and tore some out of the book. This was really difficult because of the industrial glue, and I had to slice the drawings off the paper underneath with a kitchen knife.
I then glued some of them onto canvases. This one was the first. This time I used a good art friendly glue. Then I stared painting on top of the drawings.The figure in this painting with the hat, is actually cut out of a canvas I painted in 1988 at art school. It was glued into the same book with the same glue. It covers a face holding his head in his hands and screaming, the folly of youth.
After painting various different words on the sign, I came up with No and No way. Guess it is some kind of protest piece. What I liked about it enough to rework it was my original youthful fantasy of a city.Anyway, now it is yours, I am happy to have one of your drawings for it in exchange.
Tim.”
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