Apartment block on a rainy day 2, oil 20 x 15cm

Apartment block on a rainy day, oil 20 x 15cm

Apartment lights at the end of a street, oil 20 x 15cm

I thought you invited him, pastel, A2

Albion sunset, oil 20 x 15cm

RADIUS: Tinning Street Presents, November 6-26

Blue duct, oil on board, 15 x 20cm

Radius presents over 100 small oil paintings of objects and scenes found within a short walking distance of the gallery in which they are exhibited, radiating out from a small laneway in Brunswick, Melbourne: dumpsters, tram passengers, kitchen sinks, boom gates and so on. The most ordinary things and the weather and light that describe them are beautiful and mysterious, but it is hard to realise this unless we are compelled to stop and study them beyond a passing glance. Visitors are invited to look at the paintings, then take a short walk to consider again the fascinating shapes, forms and colours of their immediate radius.  

An online catalogue will be available soon, and I'll continue regularly posting paintings from this show here. Fore more info: http://www.tinningstreetpresents.com

Violet and black corner, oil on board, 20 x 15cm

The call, oil on board, 20 x 15cm

Rummaging though some old stuff I came across this drawing from about 15 years ago, one of the first test pieces for The Arrival which I'd forgotten about. At this time, long before the book was published or even fully sketched out, the drawing style was reminiscent of Raymond Briggs (The Snowman, When the Wind Blows), who has always had a big influence on my picture book work. The 'reptiles' I later felt were too defined here - better that we don't see their heads or too much other detail, lest they become overly literal in the imagination. So the style and realisation here is not right, but the basic image of the family walking down a street with something dark migrating across the sky was one of two or three key images that seeded the rest of the story.

Spare Parts Theatre Rules of Summer. Puppeteers Allan Girod and Nick Pages-Oliver. Picture: Simon Santi The West Australian

Congrats to the cast and crew of Spare Parts Puppet Theatre's adaptation of Rules of Summer, which is currently playing at the Dolphin Theatre, UWA (Perth). The show is a wonderful mix of characters, objects and dreamlike situations extrapolated in a very innovative way from the book, actually less an adaptation than a reinvention of parts. And many of those parts bursting from the stage into the audience and occupying the entire threatre space: bubbles, snails, wind, recalcitrant socks. I always imagined this would be a terrific book to recreate theatrically simply because it is so open-ended and 'unwritten', and SPPT have picked up those threads with their trademark originality and insight. Excellent performances full of humour and pathos, and wonderful to see kids totally buying into this universe and raising a ruckus! Rules of Summer  runs until October 8.