The Tasmanian Writers’ Festival starts today and I did a special art print for it. Prints will be available at the festival or you can buy one here. Click the image in the buy now thing below and it should pop up a bigger image (it won’t make you buy one if you do this though you totally should buy one).
I’m also doing “Whisky Tales – Stories You Can Drink To” with Brett Steel and Bernard Lloyd on Saturday night but it’s sold out so you can’t come. Unless you bought a ticket obviously. Look, there are lots of excellent things on and you should go.
As you can see from the poster, Kim Foale and I have an exhibition up at the Long Gallery in the Salamanca Arts Centre at the moment. Kim has done the ceramic bits and I have done the drawing bits, so we’ve covered the walls and the floor quite nicely. Kim’s written a bit about her stuff on her blog here.
The idea behind my part of the exhibition popped into my head when I was catching a plane from Hobart’s glorious International Airport. It was a damp sort of a day and we all had to walk across the tarmac in the rain. You could immediately spot the locals by the way they mostly ignored this, while the tourists looked increasingly baffled by the lack of a covered aerobridge at the one airport you’d think could really use a covered aerobridge. Waiting on the stairs to get in out of the drizzle, I turned, glimpsed the cheery orange WELCOME TO HOBART sign and “Damp On Arrival” was born.
On the flight to Sydney, a sketchbook was filled with scribbles about life in Australia’s southernmost capital and the exhibition is the finished result of the best of them. It’s a celebration of Hobart without, hopefully, getting too precious about it. It’s a bit of a test of how long you’ve lived here to see if you can get all 57 of them. “Whale Watching” seems to be the most elusive.
We are packing it all up this Sunday (17th of May) at 5pm. Do come along and have a look, or you might end up a sad clown like Arthur.
The Mud & Ink exhibition will be opening on Friday May 8 at the Long Gallery. There will be lots of inky drawings by me and muddy ceramics by the magnificent Kim Foale. If you want to register your excitement on facebook, you may do so here.
Yes, First Dog On The Moon and I have successfully crowdfunded a mission to blaze Tasmania’s whisky trail on e-bikes and turn the trip into a book. We have passed the $8000 required to make it happen, and are now hoping to get it to $13000 so we can print all the cartoons in the book in glorious full colour.
For more info and the chance to assist in this noble undertaking, go to the pozible page here.
