maelstromArt: 2011

Mid Life Crisis

'Mid Life Crisis' oil & acrylic on canvas

The milkbar down the road from my childhood home had only one stand-up arcade game: Wonder Boy. With his stumpy legs and a grin that never budged, Wonder Boy shuffled through that flat landscape on quest after quest to rescue his eternally-endangered girlfriend. My mate and I learned to make 20c last a long time on that machine, guiding our hero through the various perils of the game with the aid of a fairy, some magic fruit and, of course, a skateboard.

So for me, when it came to choosing a game to celebrate as part of Bleeding Heart Gallery's Emulator, there was no competition.

But Emulator is an exhibition celebrating more than the 8-bit games themselves; it's also about the nostalgia we feel for them, our fondness for the pixilated pastimes we once had. So my Wonder Boy is, like many people who were kids in the 80s, a bloke who's not as young as he used to be but is still young at heart. With a new set of wheels, this is a thirty-something Wonder Boy who is glad to get back in the action.

The intensity and narrowness of the palate available to 1980s game designers was something I really enjoyed. In acknowledgement of that aesthetic, I have imposed cartoon-style figures in oil paint on a photo-naturalistic acrylic background, using the contrast of form, colour and materials to signify the juxtaposition this ageing Wonder Boy feels: the disused world of an 80s-style suburbia comes alive with superimposed icons from the game as, having thrown his axe at the right egg again after all these years, Wonder Boy rediscovers the brightness of his youth.

With many of the characters from the original Wonder Boy and nods to some of the great 8-bit games, this painting takes Wonder Boy to a new level.

Wonder Boy- the making of 'Mid Life Crisis'

Emulator was held at Bleeding Heart Gallery in September 2011.

The exhibition showcased a number of emerging and established artists from all over Australia.

These artists looked to create their homage to characters, landscapes and levels of our favourite 8-bit, 16-bit and classic arcade games.

I chose Wonder Boy and decided to put him in a realistic setting.

FOOMPTY DOOMPS & THE FEATHERED WHIRL-WRANGER

This piece exemplifies my longstanding interest in the possibilities of combining the cuddly with the grotesque. It is part of my series of “Teddybugs” and, like many of them, grew from a spontaneous sketch to become a highly refined piece.

Essential to my process is an appreciation for strong composition and organic shapes. So, though pieces such as this develop from doodles in an apparently unplanned way, they are founded on technical cornerstones such as colour and form.

In varying from my regular practice of sketching thumbnails to draw this vignette to scale, my awareness of the specialist aspects of drawing were heightened. And it was in this headspace that I reconsidered the challenge of drawing fur.

Fibrous filaments, clumped yet separate, strands and stubble … fur is one of those things which is only appealing in certain contexts: on the body of something we love it draws our hand; off that body and in balls on the floor – or in our food – nothing can be worse.

‘Foompty Doomps’ is essentially an animated furball, a creature whose lack of physical definition is symbolic of the fact that it is beyond any definition itself. I perceive it to be somewhat doleful – perhaps bullied – and, like so many shy people, it hides behind its fur. Paradoxically, however, though it cowers from the viewer, it still has courage to make eye contact and seems to implore for connection. In contrast, the ‘Wispy-Wranger’ in the top right of the frame sneers a little, perhaps believing it is ‘above’ both the ground-hugging fur-ball below it and the viewer. None the less, there’s something honest and brave about ‘Foompty’, something intrinsically likeable, and if you had to pick one of them to be your friend, it wouldn’t be a tough decision.

Evoking empathy in a viewer by enlarging certain features of a figure is as old as characature itself; animators and character designers distort and distend every part of a figure’s appearance in order to elicit an emotional response. So, in experimenting with proportion in the creation of these fantastical creatures, I looked for new ways to make ugly forms endearing. It is the combination of foompty’s pudgy fluff and focused eyes which make it such a successful character, demonstrating that, though the body of a figure may seem formless in some respects, clarity of character is as simple as getting the eyes right.