Us working!

It is so much fun hanging out in our studio creating and working. Sometimes it does get a bit messy and we get paint everywhere but that is the fun of it!!!

Here is us on the weekend getting ready to do some painting.

Here is us standing next to our sculpture 'It Takes Two,' which has just been acquired by Woollahra Council which is so exciting! It is going to be placed on Oxford Street in prime position which means that hundreds of members of the public will see it every day. We have recently started doing a lot of work for public spaces and council areas. We think this is a great place to take our art because it is for everyone now - not only people who visit art galleries. We could now be classified as street artists!

As Banksy says 'There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.' In our case we hope to make the world a more artistic place!

Here is a close up of 'It Takes Two.'

On the weekend we painted our new painting titled The evolutionary process of uninhibited breeding. We are trying to put more passion in our work and have been experimenting in black and white. This is quite a large painting.

   

Finally here is the close up of Dr Hugh Wirth, our Archibald painting which is massive this year! Hope you like!

Our Exhibition 'Wild at Heart'

I just wanted to post a few photo's of our exhibition 'Wild at Heart,' which was held at Richard Martin's Art Gallery in Paddington. 

It was a really fun night and a great turn out ! All our family and friends showed up for some wine and to look at our artwork.  

The Bronze Foundry

Today we went and visited our Bronze Foundry where our patination is done on our sculptures. We spent a few hours and were lucky enough to have a tour of the foundry where the wax sculpture process was explained to us. This is a similar process used by the foundry who cast the rhino's.

The first step is creating the original artwork made out of clay or plaster which we then bring to the foundry. 

A negative master mould of the original artwork is then made out of silicone rubber, reinforced by plaster. This mould is hollow inside and can allow other substances to be poured inside it.

Once this mould is made, extremely hot wax is poured inside it in equal layers to create another negative mould made purely out of wax. This has to be done as the wax is a strong enough substance to hold the bronze.

After the wax mould is made special machines are used to pour the Bronze inside it to make the cast. The wax on the outside of the cast then has to be melted away at an extremely high temperature and so the sculpture then goes into the oven! 

After that the sculpture goes through a range of cleaning methods and is then colourised to achieve that beautiful brown bronzed look!

 

From beginning to end making our sculptures is quite a long process but it is worth it because the results are beautiful.

A message from Dr Wirth

After our trip to Melbourne we couldn't wait to start our painting! We set up the huge blank canvas in our studio and got to work as soon as possible! Here is the final product.

Our Archibald Art Prize 2012 Entry

We contacted Dr Hugh Wirth a few months ago, because we respect and admire him so much and decided we would just love to paint him for the Archibald Art Prize this year.

Dr Hugh Wirth is one of Australia’s foremost animal welfare advocates. He was inspired to join the RSPCA as a junior member in 1948 after the secretary visited his school. He went on to train as a vet and has now been a council member for RSPCA Victoria since 1969, and President since 1972. He has devoted some 50,000 volunteer hours to ensure the welfare of animals. He is former president of the World Society for the Protection of Animals and was the first non-European to hold the position.

 

In 1988, Dr Wirth was the first Australian to receive the prestigious George T Angell Humanitarian Award, presented to an individual with exceptional commitment to animals and their quality of life and who has had a profound influence on public attitudes to animals. Dr Wirth has dedicated his life to giving a voice to the voiceless. 

We flew down to Melbourne the weekend of the 14th January 2012 to meet him, our children Jessie and Ben came too. He lives near Marc's mum in Melbourne so he wasn't hard to find, and we hired a car from the airport to get there. We met him at 2pm together with his family of 2 terrier dogs and 2 cats.  We were invited into his sitting room where we chatted about our ideas, and asked questions.  He came across a really lovely man, very humble after everything he has achieved. 

We did some sketches and took reference shots, we have come up with an awesome idea, and will post the painting once it is completed.

Our trip to Beijing

To visit our bronze art foundry and the newly built Ying Ren Hotel (in the film district of Beijing) where our Paparazzi Dog Sculpture will be displayed in the Port Cochere.

Day One

We arrived in Beijing on New Years Day after a red-eye flight so we were dazed to say the least. Beijing airport is one of the largest airports in the world and it really was huge, like some sort of giant planetarium, the ceilings filled with tiny lights, shining like perfect stars.  We left our coats in the suitcases so we felt the cold straight away as we waited for the shuttle train to take us to baggage collection. The temperature was -3°c and when we finally stepped outside it was freezing but the skies were clear blue. The taxi driver played Lady Gaga on the radio as we sped through Beijing to our hotel.  The streets were clear and very wide, not how we had imagined at all and a lot of the buildings seemed modern and immense.

We decided to make a full day of it and ignore our jet lag. We visited Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City where The First Emperor was filmed. Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen Gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace) located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the third largest city square in the world (440,000 m² - 880m by 500m). It has great cultural significance as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history. Outside China, the square is best known in recent memory as the focal point of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, a pro-democracy movement which ended on 4 June 1989 with the declaration of martial law in Beijing by the government and the death of at least hundreds of protesters.  

The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government.

 

After this we went to the famous 798 Art District to see the amazing streets filled with sculptures and numerous contemporary art galleries. 798 Art Zone, or Dashanzi Art District, is a part of Dashanzi in the Chaoyang District of Beijing that houses a thriving artistic community, among 50-year old decommissioned military factory buildings of unique architectural style. It is often compared with New York's Greenwich Village or SoHo. We got our fill and left feeling completely inspired!!  We were too tired to go out for dinner, so we got room service and went to bed.

 

Day Two

We woke up sweating, the heating was turned up way too high in the hotel and we were stifling. Outside it looked cold like it might snow. We ran down to lobby to get air, it was much colder than yesterday. We visited the Summer Palace, the gardens were mystical with snow on the lake and completely iced over with a sea of people walking on it.  We walked all the way to the top of the palace and what an amazing view greeted us!  In the afternoon we went back to 798 Art District to soak up more art,  then in the evening we went to an acrobatics show, which was amazing, the flexibility of the performers was mind blowing, however the part that will always stick in our minds was the motocycles going round in circles in a metal ball, it was an accident waiting to happen.

Day Three

Today we visited our bronze foundry, we hired a car to drive as there as it was an hour and a half from the hotel. It was a huge factory where we were met by Mr Li and discussed patinas, and were shown around. Then we continued on to the Ying Ren hotel, only 20 minutes away. The Ying Ren Hotel, which is invested in and developed by Shenzhen Yitian Group, is still under construction in Huairou, Beijing. Ying Ren Hotel is situated at the eastern area of the site of China (Huairou) Movie & TV Industry Zone of the China Film Group Corporation, which is the core area of Huairou New Town's section of Beijing. It is described as the first conference resort hotel featuring "movie and television culture". Montages with movie themes will be seen everywhere in the design of hotel.The hotel will be built and decorated in accordance with five-star standards. Its facilities are designed make it a world-class industrial complex for film-making and movie and TV themed tourism. We had a good look at  the Port Cochere where our paparazzi dog sculpture will be positioned at 6m high overlooking cars and hotel customers as they drive or walk in and photographing them as they enter the hotel.

The taxi driver told us the population of Beijing is 22 million. We then drove to The Great Wall which was another half hour further, it is 6500 km long, built 2200 years ago on the border of Mongolia . The Great Wall of China is a series of stone and earthen fortifications in northern China, built originally to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire against intrusions by various nomadic groups. We got a cable car to the top of the mountain to the Mutianyu part of the Great Wall, 90 km northeast of Beijing, which has 26 watchtowers.  It was so breathtakingly beautiful, no photos can do it justice. We just couldn't get enough of it but it was bitterly cold, so we only walked on it for a short distance.

Day 4

We visited the infamous Silk Market to haggle, haggle, haggle for copy bags and shoes, it was exhausting!  Then we went back to 798 Art District to UCCA gallery and the Long March Gallery, the contemporary art scene is just huge here in Beijing and there was so much to see.

The last few days in Beijing we relaxed and spent most of our time looking at art, and talking about new ideas for our sculptures and paintings.

We are looking forward to a very creative 2012!!