Building Investigation 9

Wicks Surf Shop

acrylic paint, micron pens on stretched canvas

16" x 20"

The Wicks Surf Shop piece was the ninth sustained investigation of a series of 15 and I chose to "investigate" buildings from my childhood in Sydney that held meaning to me. Wicks was the surf shop from which I bought my first surfboard in 2014, in North Sydney. Wicks serves as a very memorable place in my mind, and I still have that board in my room to this day, I see it every morning when I wake up. I recently reignited my passion for surfing and I always remember Wicks, the sort of run-down, well-loved shop right on the beach as where I bought my first board. I was also very inspired by both my Soccer Cards of Victoria Road project and by the works of Japanese artist Nao Tatsumi, as I felt like she captured sun-bleached cities very well.

I wanted to start interconnecting my pieces a little more now that I'm in the second half of the sustained investigation series, and this was the first one where I was intentionally thinking about common elements that are regularly present in my works. My loud use of color is always present (I'm vaguely colorblind so the super light pastels don't cut it). Also, the power lines have been very present in this series once or twice already and I want to keep that organized mess that comes along with cities. I'm going to start adding people slowly to my cityscapes after a comment from Al Dawson something along the lines of "You have very lonely memories, there's no people."

If anyone thought I could have beaten my procrastination from the others they were wrong, I set a new precedent on this one as I didn't even START the assignment until nearly 8 hours after it was due and I ended up staying up till around 2 completing the painting. I'm very pleased with how this turned out and how it connects to my other SI's as I think it fits nicely, and I think the slow addition of people will really create stronger ties between the viewer and my art, as people help to create scale and emotion.