Joshua Santospirito Art

Images taken from development art for the graphic novel Sydney/Purgatorio

Tonight’s concept art for Sydney/Purgatorio, a graphic novel that I am working on slowly with Craig San Roque about migration, trauma, psychotherapy and architecture.

Life is fairly distracting. I have an old habit of packing short-term projects in like sardines which usually stops me from working on the slowburn long-term projects that I truly love. I’ve been trying to stop this habit for a couple of years and I’m starting to get better at saying no. HOWEVER

Recently I was asked by Brian Ritchie to perform my guitar-stuff at the VIP launch of MONA’s new exhibition The Museum of Everything as part of Dark Mofo in Hobart. I haven’t played much in recent years … because comics … and I honestly didn’t think it was going to be a particularly interesting gig but it turned out that I loved playing in the wide expanses of the resonant cavernous underground areas of that crazy museum. Totally cranked the noise! Had a ball.

FUTURE THINGS that you may be intrigued by (or deeply suspicious of) 
July 15, Saturday – Read To Me, a comic-reading event at The Comic Con-Versation at Ashfield Library in Sydney. Read To Me will become a regular bimonthly event in Sydney, so jump on their website and get on their email list. It’s going to be a great way to get your storytelling fix from visiting and local artists.

Should be currently working on ...
Sydney/Purgatorio, a monolithic graphic novel that I shall be working on forever with Craig San Roque. It’s about migration, hope, psychotherapy, cities and architecture. See the angel artwork at the top but also you can look at these process images on Instagram.

Things to purchase if you want to purchase a thing
You can always buy my graphic novels
* The Long Weekend in Alice Springs
* Swallows Part One (as well as at bookstores across Australia)
* I Wanna Be A Travella in Sri Lanka; a full colour travel journal book of my recent trip to Sri Lanka.

Reading Recommendation
I recently read Emil Ferris’s debut graphic novel My Favourite Thing is Monsters which is super intense, messily written, problematic and TOTALLY BRILLIANT. Read it!!

I’ve been asked to play my weird guitar music at the VIP launch of The Museum of Everything, the new major exhibition that MONA is putting on. VIP Launch, for those lucky enough to be invited, is on Saturday the 10th at 10am, the public opening is from midday, there will be LOADS of great music acts throughout the museum, and of course Dark MOFO is on with Mogwai playing in town that night!

Very excited as I haven’t performed much music due to working like a slave on graphic novel work over the last couple of years. The only guitar playing I’ve gotten in lately is the live performances of The Long Weekend in Alice Springs at the Something Somewhere Film Festival in Alice Springs.

Craig San Roque and I performed ‘The Long Weekend in Alice Springs’ to two sell-out crowds this past weekend in Alice Springs! Very well received, I was a bit blown away by the reception it received. Really wonderful festival of mostly documentary films. Pics provided by Caddie Brain and Ben Fox. 

You can listen to a great segment at Radio National hosted by Lynne Malcolm about psychological aspects of cross cultural interactions which features Craig San Roque talking about Central Australia. It also features segments from the live performances of The Long Weekend in Alice Springs, which has Craig narrating the book and myself (Joshua) playing music. The whole segment is fascinating though – if you have a spare half an hour then you should get a cuppa and have a listen.

Big announcement of the program for the Something Somewhere Film Festival 2017, and I’ll be heading up in April to perform The Long Weekend in Alice Springs, with Craig San Roque – IN ALICE SPRINGS!
Check the full program here!