267. Mango
267. Mango, 2026, Öl auf Leinwand, 30 × 40cm
Social media today is very much like the town square of the middle ages, where primitive fears of the unknown capture the popular imagination but there is a realm of the senses left behind where the human made mark is concerned. I don’t remember much from that year in detail but as a 14 year old, needing to express the tumble of new experiences, I very much enjoyed the chaotic truth of paint, and it has been a battle ever since to put aside predictable marks in preference to marks that carry something beyond the mere means-to-and-end function of a colored pencil. Painting was a parallel of the discovery of forbidden fruits of one kind or another, a search for that sweet slice of mango.
Like every second 14 year old, I discovered people like Jimi Hendrix and the Doors in the early 1990s. It was concurrent with discovering a wide variety of contemporary music from that era and across genres from grunge to hip hop to punk and so on. These 60s/90s rockstars often perpetuated the wild and crazy rockstar image. The musicians distaste for the mainstream was however gradually sanitized over the following years in popular culture and what interests me is how it is parallelled in the art world. When making art I always enjoyed the kind of Maverick spirit it represented. It was never a bookish activity but that changed in art school, where professors rightly hold a blow torch to your assumptions, and you have to rebuild your artwork from scratch a hundred times. Nonetheless, to be unconventional was a core value I always found hard to throw away, absorbed perhaps from listening to experimental music. In late high school music taste for me curved more toward electronic music and gradually jazz with periodic returns to all of the aforementioned genres but more as a tourist rather than a disciple.
15 years later, I remember walking past Nigel Hewitt one day on the way to or from my studio, which was beside his studio for some years in suburban Perth. I always liked his wax paintings from the 90s as a young artist. I remember seeing them through the window of the gallery on King Street and being mesmerized by them. I asked him about his work with unconventional tools and processes. ‘Anything to find a new way to make a mark’ he responded. It was only 10 words but always has stayed with me. That kind of core sensibility is so crisp and rock and roll but so largely gone from art today—be it the amateur world of hobby artists or the high-end world of international art markets.
