Some images from the exhibition that is currently in Alice Springs at Watch This Space gallery of the art from the graphic novel along with development sketches and earlier version of pages and other bits and bobs.
Exhibition dates – May 10 to June 7
Alice Springsians please note in your diaries – this is the Friday after Wide Open Space.
You’re invited of course.
Please come.
Some recent media stuff
Bernard Caleo reviews The Long Weekend graphic novel on the Smartarts program on Triple R
Also – an Arts hub interview relating to Josh’s work at the MONA FOMA in January 2013.
The long wait for The Long Weekend is finally OVER!
You can buy it now direct from the San Kessto Publications website.
Confusingly – printers send you this thing to look at which has all of the pages all over the place …
Excitingly, the print it on glossy stuff which looks looks nice and shiny! The real thing won’t be printed on shiny paper … so this is a nice novelty before the final piece comes in a couple weeks.
This comic was completed in March 2013 by Josh at Chugnut (comics weekend in Victoria). It was written with major assistance from Katsutoshi Osakabe and Nadine Kessler who helped with translations, I sneakily placed in some people I know, borrowed their stories somewhat and whatnot – thankyous therefore go to Jerome Santospirito, Andrew Harwood, Glen Ewers, Sarah Katz, Sophie Clear and anyone who looks after the Cradle Mountain National Park. This comic is part of the Sleuth series of comics, an investigation into the spirituality of modern Australia. I also stole something from TGH Strehlow.
Here’s how you make a cover for a book …
Step 1 – spend weeks drawing lots of different ideas
Step 2 – have many arguments with graphic designer wife
Step 3 – don’t give in
Step 4 – realise that wife probably has better sense for this stuff than you do … and compromise
Step 5 – Draw the title, draw the outlines of two dogs about to have a scruff using the only lightbox you have available (the sun)
Step 6 – Colour in the texture of that big shaggy dog on the back cover!
Step 7 – Finish the writing on the back (some endorsements from Jennifer Mills, Rod Moss and Tom Singer!! )
Step 8 And add the spine.
Here’s the spine up close!
Step 9 – scan and relinquish to graphic designer.
At Documenta in 2012, the most interesting piece I came across was this historical oddity by Charlotte Salomon. It is a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts, an ambitious fusion of visual art, poetry and perhaps other hidden artforms by a young Jewish German women who eventually found herself in Auschwitz. The entire work was made in 1941-42 and is a series of about 760 gouache paintings that retell the story of numerous suicides in her family, mostly women on a background of suggested abuse. It was mostly in German which I found difficult to fully understand (my German not being up to scratch despite being married for a number of years now to a beautiful German lass) but the intense visuals were quite astounding. I realised very quickly that this kind of artwork, which was laid out in a series of cases (as you’ll see in the images below), was a form of comics. It also happened to coincide with the period where I was organising the first of the Sleuth series of exhibits, which mostly involved me using entire sheets of paper as panels for comics that were to spread across walls. I found it very interesting indeed. I must get my mitts on a copy of the book of these images.
