Kirrily Morrison

Baker Smith first met Kirrily in a book club. Then in London some time later before Kirrliy’s playing took her half the way round the world. As far as we know, Kirrily was the first female to gain a Masters degree in trumpet from the VCA in Melbourne.

When did you begin trumpet?
I began cornet when I was eight and trumpet when I was about 12.

Where has it taken you? 
It has taken me to Palestine to perform for children in refugee camps. And it has taken me to Germany for a baroque concert in a castle and to nightclubs in Glasgow playing pop gigs.

Did you play with any circus groups in Europe?
I played the pink panther tune to accompany a clown act and gypsy music to accompany acrobats.

You teach music in Perth now. How do you find that?
Teaching is great because you get to witness and share a student’s pleasure in sound and listen to them develop an understanding of how beautiful it is to play melodies.

What is a good age to start? 
I think eight is good.

Any tips for passionate young musicians?
Play as if you are singing through your instrument. Breath deeply at the start of melodic phrases.

How many hours practice is needed to get good?
When I first started cornet I only played 15 minutes a day but when I was doing my Masters I was practicing between three or four hours a day as well as rehearsing in ensembles for a few hours.

What have been the challenging pieces to learn?
Too many! ‘Five o’clock in the afternoon’ by Paul Sarcich – a piece for multiple percussion, piano and solo trumpet, it’s about a bull fight.

What are you playing at the moment?
In class today I played ‘Caravan’ and ‘I dreamed a Dream’ from Les Miserables.

Gregory Baldwin

Gregory Baldwin is a Melbourne illustrator who has developed a thoughtful and warm style wrapped in playful visual metaphors.

Hi Gregory, please tell us a bit about yourself, your environment, and background in art?
I am originally from the UK and live in Melbourne, Australia with my wife and children. My studio is a part of our house so I work on my own most of the day or look after the kids when they are home. I do have a dog, Ludo, for company when she pops out I listen to the radio.

I studied Fine Art and Art History at Canterbury College of Art. The years following art school was difficult time for an artist as it was the Thatcher years yet it was an optimistic time as there was a real sense of an artistic and design revolution happening. I was involved in small design partnership for a couple of years where I design and hand printed fabric which we turned into unique clothing, very early 80s kitsch. As for the rest of the 80s I continued painting and experimenting around with photography and digital art.

What did you enjoy doing as a child? 
I come from the seaside town Leigh-on-Sea situated on the mud flats of the Thames estuary in Essex, England, so I spent most of the time sailing and mucking around on the mud. When the weather was not so good, I would draw, read, listen to music or watch the dreaded TV (fortunately there was not much on TV which allowed me to more drawing). As a family we use to go for a lot of walks around the coast or go on sailing trips that usually meant being grounded up a marshy creek when the tide was out which gave time to explore the marshes, this was Great Expectations country and a respect for the environment and its history grew on me.

Were you always making art?
I always loved drawing, when I went on a family outing to London to visit the National Gallery and The Tate Gallery I was inspired in particularly with Op and Pop Art. I remember seeing Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol and thinking, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” I always enjoyed anything to do with art and loved the movies about artists especially “The Rebel” by Tony Hancock. It did not occur to me I could study art until I left school whilst studying computer science at the local tech college where I made new friends who were studying art.

What books did you like as a kid?
The books I remember enjoying as a child as far as I can remember was The Silver Sword, The Narnia Chronicles, Ronald Searle’s Molesworth titles and an old copy of Tanglewood Tales that had some really disturbing illustrations (well I thought so at the age of 9), I really enjoyed the tales though.

You used to work in a bookstore didn’t you? Did you read on the job?
Yep, it all started when I was working in the Royal Academy shop in London which had fantastic art books, I was a pig in mud. You do not get time to read when you work in a bookstore but you do get to discover books that you would not have normally read. It was the admiring the book jackets that inspired me to take up illustration, in particularly the work of Andrzej Klimowski and Jeffrey Fisher.

You have a knack of combining different elements together.
Tell us bit about your working process, inspirations and mentors?
Inspirations: Picasso (I believe “Guernica” to be the greatest illustration of the twentieth century) and late Matisse, Max Beckman, Gustave Courbet come to mind straight away. Generally I am like a magpie and learn by looking around the galleries, museums, art books, art mags, even street art. I like it when I discover something that really grabs me and gives me something new to think about or moves me.

Metaphors: I find them really useful in illustration they make the work more intriguing. Picasso and Courbet used the metaphor beautifully; Courbet’s “Studio” is full of them. Illustration has to be less mysterious after all you communicating the essence of a brief or story in a way that the readership can understand so the metaphor has to be more obvious, the challenge is to use the metaphor as a tool in an inventive way.

Mentors: I have not had any training or tutoring since art school where the teaching was inspiring. It would be nice to have a mentor alas I do not have one now.

Do you sketch ideas out, or got straight to the computer?
I sketch ideas out straight into the computer using a tablet, I only use pencil and paper to work out the composition which for some reason seems difficult to do on the screen.

Your style has evolved over time, how do you think it has changed?
It has changed considerably, my early illustration was using the same technique and approach that I had developed in my fine art work which was a very abstracted and ethereal use of found imagery, photography and the use of the computer. I was commissioned to do some illustrations for the science magazine 21C and from there I pick up more work. As I moved more into illustration I was being asked to produce more literal or pictorial illustrations so I had to adapt to suit the audience becoming more figurative using found imagery and scanned textures. Since then it has evolved to what it is today where the use of photography and found imagery is rarely used. Hopefully it will continue to evolve.

Do you have to give certain considerations to style when illustrating for the children’s market?
I simply try to make the images appealing but not too distracting and not too dowdy. I want the children to be engaged with the book.

What sort of creative leeway do you get with briefs?
It depends on the title; usually I think I get fair bit leeway, I do not get that “death by committee” that sometimes occurs with some educational or institutional jobs.

The pop-up book cover for Melbourne Child Magazine is a fun image and one of my favourites.
Yes, that was a nice one to work on, I usually come up with the concept but in this case they wanted a pop-up book and my job was to make it work which was the fun part.

What is inspiring you at the moment?
That is a tricky one, illustration wise I can think of anything in particular I must have been doing it for too long, I have been thinking of Patrick Heron’s late works. Otherwise where do I start there is so much to choose from.

Iceworks

Last November we interviewed Gav Barbey about his new book Little Seed America. Now Gav is busy creating a series of 12 paintings, a commission from a boutique Sydney hotel. The series he is developing are Icework paintings – Slurpee-inspired blasts of colour. Gav struck upon this idea as he watched amazing patterns emerge and disappear when two long-forgotten frozen Slurpees were rediscovered in his freezer, one red and one blue, he laid them on a canvas to melt together. The happy accident led to the series Iceworks  –  a collection of paintings that involves the freezing of paints, dyes and pigments in water. The frozen candy-like ice blocks are then arranged onto canvas, the pigments swirl and run as the ice cubes melt, leaving a burst of colour in their wake. In the example above 64 ice cubes were placed on a one metre square canvas.

Jeremy Miranda

Jeremy Miranda makes paintings. Beautifully crafted paintings. We spoke with him about the narratives that run through his work and life on the North Shore.

Hi Jeremy, please tell us a bit about yourself, your environment, and background in art?
I live on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which is about 20 minutes north of Boston. My fiancé and I were drawn to this area because of the amount of farms, salt marshes and wild life preserves in the area plus its proximity to the ocean.
I graduated with a BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 2004 and have been making my living as an artist and occasional teacher ever since.

What did you enjoy doing as a child? Did you make art, did you read?
I was always making art, but of course didn’t know it by that name. As a child I was driven by my imagination and was inventing worlds, characters and narratives. Every Christmas my grandparents would get me a big block of printing paper (the kind you can get at any office store), and I would burn through it in a few months with drawings of different characters, book ideas, landscapes, whatever interested me at the moment. Drawing didn’t become about a product until I was told
that I had a knack for it. It may sound a bit clinical but up until then, like any
child, I now realize that I drew to communicate my thoughts and to give them a tangible, visual equivalent.

Children’s books had an enormous influence on me (and still do). I read all
the Chris Van Allsburg books, Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I had a big collection
of field guides on minerals, insects and plants. I even spent my first year at college as an illustrator with the intent of making children books, but soon gravitated towards painting.

Do you still have the guides you collected as a kid?
Regrettably, I don’t have a single one, and couldn’t even begin to guess where they ended up. Nowadays I collect things found while out on walks. Driftwood, bracket mushrooms rocks, really anything natural with a unique form. We also have a growing collection of cacti.

There is a strong visual arts culture in Massachusetts, why do you think that is?
I’m not exactly sure, I would imagine that it has a lot to do with the sheer number of colleges and universities that have art programs in addition to the only state funded art college in the country.

Iceberg Nocturne

The iceberg paintings are an ongoing theme for you. What attracts you to them as a subject?
The iceberg series really began as an experiment in variation. I wanted a template where I was free to modulate the different elements, to observe a range of differences. Constable did a similar experiment with clouds, and of course there are the Monet haystacks which these are a bit of a nod to I guess. I also like the narrative of the lonely iceberg floating in the cold sea. I think it’s interesting how quickly inanimate objects become living things in our minds.

You play with facets of the icebergs and give them a curious architectural twist in some work? How many iceberg paintings have you made now?
The faceted icebergs are meant to imitate precious stones and gems. I don’t know exactly how many icebergs I’ve painted, but I imagine its somewhere near 100, give or take. I’m actually building a new website that will display all the icebergs I’ve painted so far in a large grid.

Faceted Iceberg

You place nature inside of interiors, or sometimes there is a sneak peak to an amazing view, or displaced object, like a ladder that links the underwater world to land above in Ladder No. 2.
The ladder paintings are metaphors about transition, more specifically going from what is familiar to something “other”, or foreign. They are more or less, romantic ideas about searching in the world.

Your paintings appear part of a broader story, they are not simply a moment in time or a one-off scene.
Yes, you’re completely right each painting is a component in a broader yet loose narrative about nature, technology and searching. I’m also very interested in the craft and how the paintings come off as physical objects, this is hard to see on
the internet.

Alaska

Some of your work gives a feeling a remoteness. The icebergs obviously, but also a greenhouse floating far from land, or the interiors.
The trick with all of these paintings is that while I’m painting them I’m imagining being witness to these events; being the one person on the beach who sees the greenhouse floating, or the one person looking out seeing the lone iceberg floating, or the one person stumbling upon a greenhouse illuminated in the woods. In that way, they are not exactly about isolation so much as they are moments when we get to be alone, which is a very different thing in my mind, and the kind of discoveries one can make, much like in a dream.

Ladder No. 2

Do you get to the outdoors when not in your studio?
I try and get outdoors as much as possible but the studio can be very greedy.
It has demands that sometimes keep me indoors much longer than I’d like.

Is there a wild area, reserve or beach you would recommend a reader must visit when in your part of the world?
With out hesitation Plumb Island Bird Sanctuary on the north shore. It’s a barrier island surrounded by the ocean and salt marshes and has the distinction of being in the flight path of a multitude of migratory birds. We were lucky enough to see a snowy owl there last winter and that was very surreal.

Find Jeremy’s work here and here and here.

Gav Barbey (Part two)

This time we talk to Gav Barbey, about the release of his new book,  Little Seed America and accompanying music album Trees of North America.

You must be excited. Tell us about the songs on the album. Who wrote them, how did they come about?
The end of the book has a map showing where the trees originally come from, what states they are native to. There are also a few fun and interesting facts about the tree, ones I love. Mark Giblin, whom I have been creating Sunnytime Productions with is a musician; he wrote the six songs for the back of the book and then we made little video clips that play when you tap on the tree icon. We loved them so much Mark just steamrolled out another eight songs for other North American Trees, and these have become the animated album ‘Trees of North America’.

They are a great way for us to expand as we introduced native animals, birds, reptiles, insects and educational word text to these beautiful songs.

The eBook now has the animated pages, an activity tree map and song page, an activity animal page with short animations and the animals unique sound, an at home activity suggestion page, and then there is the animated album … it is really exciting! On my American book reading I gave away copies of the paperback at every reading in the hope of inspiring children and adults to go out there and hug a tree, to plant a tree and to sing, draw and learn with their children.

A friend of mine is training as a teacher and she recently completed an assignment using ‘Little Seed’ – “it’s a gorgeous book” was her comment. Did you think about how it might be used by parents and teachers when you first wrote it?
The only thing I knew was that I wanted it to be educational. Many of Eric Carle’s picture books are educational, and I love that. They have extras and, as a parent, I would fall in love with certain books just like my daughter would. We read them over and over and found ways to expand out the story. The map in the back of Little Seed was for me just that, a meandering off the main trail, an adventure. This is why I have always wanted to team up with an environmental society and a seed company, extend the story outside the parameters of the pages, just like my art, constantly in motion.

When the Sydney Opera House asked to perform the book with their Baby Proms program it made me realise that theatre was another way of expanding the paperback out into the wilderness. The Interactive Animated eBook is another wonderfully exciting way of wandering off the page.
To work with a producer and publisher within a bigger picture would be a collaboration I would definitely love to do. I crossed America towards the end of 2012, reading Little Seed America and doing art classes with children throughout schools, hospitals, libraries, and stores. Being able to read to children is really the whole idea of any book, and children bring a whole other dimension to a story.

With school children, I combine acting out, making sculptural pieces and building class trees and shadow sculptures. Now that’s living! I think if I could travel the world reading, creating and sitting with all those trees I would be a very happy man.

What have you learnt while researching all the different tree species around
the world?
How wonderfully diverse they all are, the small nuances that give each one its personality. I remember the first time I saw a giant magnolia flower, I took it to my studio and created a lithograph printing plate, The flower filled the studio with the most beautiful smell, it was late afternoon, I watched it close its giant petals and in the morning open back up and then spit its stamen over the studio floor. Hugging the giant baobab trees in Africa or feeling the cool trunk of the lemon scented gum tree upon the skin in summer. The thousands of seeds and the designs, the architecture of flowers.

The other morning when I was walking around the river I wondered if trees in the domestic setting got sad being so separated from each other, no longer part of a forest of their species. Then I realised they go through all the adversities we try hard to avoid – the wind, storms, drought, animals and birds attacking and eating them and so on. Yet every season they do exactly what they need to do to survive, and within this they give everything life. They are truly amazing … I often sit and listen to the unique sound each species makes as the wind blows their leaves into song.

Little Seed America is an Interactive Animated eBook
and 14 Animated North American Tree Songs

Little Seed America
Written by Gav Barbey & Justin Monjo
Original Art & Design by Gav Barbey
Original Music Composition & Animation by Mark Giblin
Directed by Gav Barbey & Mark Giblin
Produced by Sunnytime Productions & Urban Fox Studios

Gav Barbey

Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your environment.
I am an artist, a single father and dyslexic. Until three years ago my daughter and I lived in a huge warehouse on an old reclaimed rubbish tip in Sydney, Australia.
We built a world within, with paintings and sculpture, films and theatre, a bathtub and a cubby house and tented bedrooms. It was a place of luxury, and I mean this in the most affordable way – luxury when it comes to passion, wonderment, meditation and friends.

Today I wander between Melbourne and Sydney. I often feel like a travelling gypsy, determined to give my gifts to the world, to bring colour and poetry to the heart and draw a continuous line between everything.

And how did you become an artist?
I was 17 years old when I did my apprenticeship as a commercial artist.
I was taught craft, drafting and construction by artisans, reproductionists, illusionists and masters. It was about aesthetics and technique, precision, flamboyancy, extreme colour and movement and theatricality. I did my apprenticeship in one of the oldest commercial art houses in Melbourne, part of a thespian world that no longer exists.

When I studied at the [Australian] National Institute of Dramatic Art it was all about philosophical and intellectual meaning. I learnt to question everything, to influence and be influenced. As a professional designer, writer, director of theatre and film I learnt the art of free form, the art of abandonment.

When did you set up Sunnytime Productions? What is your vision for it?
Sunnytime Productions was set up in 2011, although we have been creating our hand-crafted animation for four years, honing and developing our style.
We originally started with creating a five-minute episode of an animation series called Sunnytime Zoom Zoom. It was to be a series based on vehicles and their relationship with the environment, designed for broadcast television.
We were in development for three years with broadcasters before the digital revolution came about.

Previously, broadcast content for pre-schoolers had been limited to the time slots made available by broadcasters. With the advance of the digital era and hand held devices, pre-school content is now one of the largest growth markets across hand held devices.

Our vision for Sunnytime is to be a dedicated pre-school animation company that creates unique, educational, fun, hand-painted and musical-based content across multiple platforms from animated series, eBooks, apps, games and magazine style learning worlds. Our vision like our heroes Jim Henson and Frank Oz is to enhance, enlighten and brighten the world of pre-schoolers, never just churn out computer generated noise.

1000 Pieces in New York (2009)

You seem to be collaborating with lots of different people as part of Sunnytime Productions – writers, musicians, animators etc. How does that change your creative process compared to your artistic endeavours e.g. your ice paintings?
I have spent a lifetime collaborating, from my training in theatre to my work in film and television. I have been extremely fortunate to have collaborated with some of the most sublime companies over the past 25 years.

I believe that everything is a collaboration, everything is an influence, from the beetle that flies through the wind, to the person that smiles on the street, collaboration is for me the key. My Iceworks are ultimately a culmination of all my disciplines, practices, most have had a degree of live performance; when I created 1000 pieces in New York I asked 1000 people to participate, to choose a small block of pigmented ice and place it on one of the 1000 pieces of hand rag paper then observe the transformation; I have based most of my inquiry over the past four years on the ideal that “The Viewer and Artist are one … as the viewer is artist and artist viewer, for without each other there is no Art”.

Tell us about the Little Seed project. You have two in the series published, but I believe you have several more in the work. How did the idea come about and how has it evolved? Which came first for the first Little Seed book – the paintings or the words?
Little Seed America is the second of a series of picture books I have written and illustrated. I wrote the original book for my daughter Bodhi for her first Christmas in 2004, after travelling to Borneo with Verna Simpson from the Humane Society International and the Australian actor Peter O’Brien. Being away from my daughter made me think about belonging, about what I was looking for and about family.

I wrote the original words on the inside front and back covers of my picture book hero Eric Carle’s The Grouchy Ladybug.  As a dyslexic, I write stream of consciousness, words pour out like a fountain, not always right and often made up.
I then painted the large format pages and poured out the text and there it sat in my studio for three years, amongst the countless paintings, books and sculptures I had made before Pan Macmillan published it.

Trees have been an important inspiration for me as an artist and they still amaze me everyday. The original idea was to create Little Seed books for around the world, a different variation on the story with indigenous trees and animals and birds from the country or area of that book. I had always wanted them to not only be beautiful stories and images but educational and environmental, to build like a encyclopaedia, a series that you could collect, to understand other places.

I have always wanted to align the books with an environmental society, a seed company and make them more than just picture books. I guess the digital world is helping turn what started as a humble enquiry into a greater dream. The next two books to be released will be Little Seed South America and Little Seed Asia; my dream is to have a graphic designer and an animator work with me for six months to complete six more in the series.

What did you enjoy doing as a child?
Everything, I was a rapid firefly, I had ants in my pants, I talked like a wild fire
and entertained. I was called Bubbles. I also wanted to go to space …
I still want to go to space. I daydreamed.

Next week in part two, our interview with Gav Barbey continues as he talks about the release of Little Seed America co-authored with Justin Monjo, and original music and animation by Mark Giblin.

Gabriella Soraci

Twelve months ago I stumbled upon the work of Gabriella Soraci.
Recently I decided to ask the artist about her images, and the story behind one
of her little paintings in particular.

Hi Gabriella, please tell us a bit about yourself and your environment.
I live in Eugene, Oregon, it’s a small town nestled between the Cascade mountain range and the rugged Oregon coastline. The area is known for its easy-going lifestyle. I have lived here most of my life. In addition to my own studio practice
I teach painting and drawing at the University of Oregon and at Lane Community College, both in Eugene. My husband Michael is a building designer and we have
a one-year-old daughter, Francesca.

What about your art background?
It definitely reaches back to early childhood. I was always drawing, and reading.
My sister and I attended a Waldorf school where arts, crafts, and storytelling are incorporated into daily learning in all subjects. Later on in college (Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Oregon, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California at Davis), I approached the study of fine art in a more serious way. I have always been a huge reader, so in college the choice of what to study was between studio arts, and something else like creative writing or English. Ultimately the studio won out. There is just nothing better than the feeling you get when you are deep into the creative process. Time moves differently. Petty concerns vanish. I knew that in the studio I could combine all of my interests and continue learning for the rest of my life.

So what books did you enjoy in childhood?
I was always reading, one book after another. I loved, and still love, the
Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle, and many of her other books.

Painting of My Rainbow Painting (2008)

I love your little canvas, Painting of my Rainbow Painting, it appears to fuse landscape, mindscape and still life. What led you to paint it?
The year before making Painting of my Rainbow Painting, I made a dramatic change in my process, from working abstractly from the imagination to working perceptually with simple still life items. The little watercolor painting seemed like a bridge between the two. I actually love the way you describe it – fusing landscape, mindscape, and still life. I think that is something I strive for and that my most successful paintings accomplish, so thank you! I made another attempt at incorporating the Rainbow Painting two years ago. I placed the watercolor behind a jam jar, partially refracting the image through the glass. I might use it again some day, since its symbolism continues to broaden for me over time.

Jar and Rainbow on Table (2010)

Can you tell us more about the Rainbow watercolor image?
My parents met at a spiritual community called Findhorn in Northern Scotland, where I was born in 1979. A fellow community member was the artist Bob Knox, who would go on to a successful career as an illustrator and painter. The original “Rainbow Painting,” as I call it, is a small watercolor made by Bob and given to my parents as a gift after I was born. I have always had the painting with me, either in my bedroom growing up, or in my studio, and now in my daughter’s bedroom.
That magical little watercolor certainly represents something about my childhood experience, and since it has always been with me, has most likely influenced my artistic sensibility as well. As an adult, I suppose the painting also acts as a symbol, reminding me of the dreams and utopian ideals for the future that my parents, and many of their generation had in the late 1960’s and 70’s. For some, those ideals are still alive and kicking, but there is no doubt that as a culture many of those dreams have not come to pass. In that sense, the painting is bittersweet, a marker of personal and collective history.

Sometimes your subject is a cup or simple box, other times you make
mini-constructions from everyday objects the subject. Books are stacked in a triangle, or a piece of paper is taped to a window, folded maps become little sculptures.
Well, other than the personal relationship with the Rainbow Painting, I mostly use objects that are not sentimental and have come across them somewhere in a different context. I spend a lot of time moving things around, playing with possible combinations, and looking at the resulting arrangement. I’m attracted to simple geometric shapes – squares, circles, and triangles – and find myself building these shapes with different materials.

What is currently inspiring you?
I am focused on my daughter most of the time while continuing to teach, so studio time is limited. When I do get a small chunk of time I am drawing classic subjects like apples and flowers, or the view out my studio windows to get warmed up again. I have made hundreds of drawings over the years in the “down time” between my more intense painting periods. For me painting is a slow craft, but it is one I am prepared to spend a lifetime at.
rs

Gabriella’s website and Etsy store

Folded Map II (2008)

Black Paper in Window (2008)