Rear-view is a blatant swipe from a great ABC Radio program semantically and an alliteration-heavy recap, revise, and reminisce of the past whenever. Rough sketches, photos and things of the past month/s. This one covers December 2019 and January 2020. Let’s see how it goes.

December saw Indie Comic Con in Northcote Town Hall, bringing with it my friend and comic compadre Mike Cooper aka Dr Mike 2000. Great con and some tripping around the National Gallery of Victoria where Mike informed me of the little talked about “saucy nip-slip” era of painting.

As part of our Entwined: A Recurrent Romance Kickstarter I got convinced to do some ‘sketches’ as part of the rewards which was a good excuse to challenge myself to a less planned and more free approach to painting, with mixed results.

I got into Automatism – (aiming towards non-thinking, non guiding of the painting and drawing process).

More playful play. Mindless water and watercolour mixing, semi-automatic ink stuff. Drawing and painting with both hands, and watching it all take shape in front of me. Seeing watercolours mix and dance, with a dab here, a connection of colours there, everything chaotic and perfect in its own way. No mistakes. Everything as it should be. What a relief to rediscover this.

On my travels I tamed a savage panther, deep in the Victorian savanna. Luckily, although hunted to the brink of extinction last century, a few hundred still survive in protected areas such as this.

Thanks to the automatic painting and drawing the sketches also became a little looser

Drafting a 2020 semester one unit plan at my sweet day job

I also got good and proper hooked on Nioh in January, using a PS4 kindly lent from our games friends at work. After beating the game on the first level, these are the stats for my dude.

And most random of all, I managed to witness this cool chick meeting one of her favourite music artists, Ludovico Einaudi. It happened at Melbourne Airport, next to our boarding gate at an empty piano that I asked her to play to ease our wait. Promptly after sitting down to play a Ludovico composition, in a surrealistic thermodynamic miracle of odds, the man himself appeared. Believe it or not, but here’s the proof. And that was the beginning of how we spiralled into February 2020.