Used to call these ‘side-projects’ but ‘Art’ sounds better. After all, a banana stuck to a wall is art too, right?
Star Wars Stamps | Fuck Holograms. Traditional postal stamp design for all your intergalactic post in the Star Wars universe. These went viral on Planet Earth in 2012, hot on the heels of another personal project that did the rounds earlier. Some chap affiliated with LucasArts reached out to me and I stupidly signed a very bad contract handing over all the artwork files, which were then printed on lots of merch for a huge Star Wars convention in the States. Maybe he used Jedi Mindtricks on me. Anyway, more importantly, a certain ‘Pam Greenway’ from Roanoke Valley, southwest Virginia, reached out to me and politely asked permission to use these for her local stamp club the Big Lick. May the Force be with her. (sold)
Artoons | Thrift stores are full of weird & wonderful stuff. The stuffy old artwork always looked mysterious, and made me wonder what the hell they were depicting. I bought a load of them, as well as a stash of vintage Marvel comics. I then created twisted and arbitrary new narratives by cutting & pasting speech bubbles from the cartoons onto the paintings. These were sold at galleries and art fairs. Perhaps they’ve made their way back to thrift stores by now. (sold)
XSTOCK 360 | You can bring your old unwanted XBOX 360 games to a CeX store and they take them off you for £0.67 a pop, or you can have some fun and ironically ‘re-design’ the cover sleeves in a cheesy way using crappy stock photos befitting their second hand price and sneak them back on the shelves.
Keynote Landscape Paintings | Decks. The bane of a creatives life. Slide upon slide. Day after day. Oftentimes more time is spent fucking around in decks than actually doing the work. It got me thinking, what if I use Keynote slides as the creative canvas. An exploration in working with limitations by only using the preloaded objects & shapes like leafs, trees, continents, arrows, etc, rather than Photoshop or Dal.E’s endless AI possibilities. A Bob Ross kinda calm came over me and I created a deck with these ‘Keynote Landscape Paintings’.
Extravagant Eating Competitions | What if ‘eating competitions’ served up world’s most expensive dishes instead of piles of cheap burgers and processed hot dogs? With premium ingredients like white truffles, matsutake mushrooms, fugu puffer fish, beluga caviar and dishes like steak tartare or lobster thermidore. These would be the T-Shirts you’d win if you clean your plate. Desert, anyone?
Shoplifting Bag | Make sure your store is ready for the next big riot in town, and have some suitable shopping bags stocked for your loyal boisterous clientele of looters and lifters.
Not in The New Yorker | It usually takes years before you get your first cartoon published in the New Yorker. I'm not a cartoonist, but I've embarked on a journey of rejection to see if I could one day realise the dream...
