I love now. I love this moment. I love the start of something new. This week I started a new series. A series exploring childhood experiences – one more time – but this time it’s going to be better. It’s going to be better because the more I think about my childhood, the more my memories become clearer and the more I uncover long forgotten experiences. It’s also better because the more I create, the better I get. My skills improve, my colour work gets better and the more conf

Getting a commission is an exciting prospect, being asked to create a bespoke artwork for a benefactor is exhilarating. But it’s also a strange burden. Normally, when I create artworks, it flows, it’s a representation of what in my mind, a story I’m trying to tell, a feeling I’m trying to conjure up. With a commission, it’s not so straight forward. There’s a bit of second guessing, will they like this, what colours do they prefer, will this fit with their other works. Every t

Here's the thing - getting a commission from someone is always a little bit tricksy. You go from doing whatever you like, whatever is in your head, to creating something for a specific person with specific tastes for a specific environment. Even though many benefactors will say 'Do whatever you like!", you can't not be influenced by them. You want them to like what you do. After all, all artists are searching for love through their work, whether they admit it or not. So this

Here’s the thing – getting a commission from someone is  always a little bit tricksy. You go from doing whatever you like, whatever is in your head, to creating something for a specific person with specific tastes for a specific environment. Even though many benefactors will say ‘Do whatever you like!”, you can’t not be influenced by them. You want them to like what you do. After all, all artists are searching for love through their work, whether they admit it or not. So this

Sometimes I create an artwork that’s a little unloved. It gets turned around to face the studio wall and is kind of forgotten about. I recently came across this work ‘Who pushed Annette?’. When I was about 8 years old, my cousins visited our house from Sydney. My mum and dad were renovating our house. Six cousins were standing in the doorway looking into this chasm where the floor used to be. I nudged my cousin to see what would happen and she fell into the pit and impaled he

There’s some things we keep going back to again and again as an artist. For me, it’s memories of my childhood. I can’t quite pin my finger on why, other than it’s formed who I am as an adult. I truly believe we carry our childhood all our lives and when we meet people as adults we still greet them as a child looking out from within our grown-up eyes. To be honest, I thought I had exhausted my childhood hoard of memories – at least the ones that could easily be rendered onto c

And breathe. The Other Art Fair Sydney is over. It’s now moved on to London a I sold two works on opening night, one to the home of the National Arts Writer for The Australian newspaper. The next day nothing; day two nothing, then in a flurry on Sunday morning I sold all my remaining works before lunchtime. Since then, I’ve sold another four works from the It’s For Your Own Good series. A sell-out show. Plus two prints – and another work from my new portraits series. It’s unp

In just an hour I set up my works for my new show, It’s for your own good. These works explore experiences from my childhood that inform who I am now. It’s extraordinarily handy having all the works the same size and so expertly framed, because it was a simple case of banging in a nail in the wall and hanging the works. You can see how fast it was here: https://youtu.be/yMVVlC2XSqk The show opens on Thursday. I’ll let you know how it goes. #art #painting #contemporaryart #Pap

Wait till your father gets home, collage and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Monde Monde Artist, 2016 “Wait till your father gets home!” is one of the most terrifying sounds any child can hear and it evokes strong memories of our childhood. Powerful memories can be triggered by the simplest things – prickles in the lawn, the smell of dagwood dogs at the show, floaties at the swimming pool. In my new exhibition coming up at M16 Artspace, I question whether our memories are

Wait till your father gets home, collage and synthetic polymer paint, by Monde Monde I’m frantically working on my final works for my next exhibition at the M16 Art Space in Canberra. The works follow a similar theme to my last show – exploring our childhood experiences and how they shape us as adults. I’m obsessed about how as adults we relate to our child-self. As children we see every day things in extraordinary, disproportionate ways. This same distortion can be seen in h

As a kid our cat Sally would mate with a feral Tomcat who lived in the wild. Two months later she’d pop out a litter of kitties, often in the washing basket in the laundry, amongst our dirty socks and pyjamas. Sally was a good mother and a beautiful cat with an incredible light grey fur, a colour I’ve never really seen since. And couldn’t mix on a palette even if I tried. Sometimes we’d find hessian sacks on the river’s edge under a bridge, filled with kittens and a brick. My

I love talking to artists about their work, it gives you so much more depth and understanding for their work. And that’s why I’ve decided to try and create short little videos about my work as I go along. This video is all about my recent exhibition Dry Your Tears which explored how our childhood affects us as adults. It’s rough around the edges, but I’d love to know what you think. It probably needs some nice backing track, but there’s room for improvement next time. #art #c

I drank too much. Like many people, when I’m nervous, I drink. Just like on opening night of Dry Your Tears at Stur Gallery. If you popped in and I blithered at you, please forgive my nervy, rambunctious, crazed-faced bewilderment. In the fog of booze, I did have a little eureka moment. Standing there, I was surrounded by all these deeply personal experiences from my childhood, acted out by little toys, dolls and teddy bears. I always thought they were my stories – my feeling

Sometimes you meet someone new and you can immediately see how they would have been as a kid. In fact, it’s one of my favourite internal pastimes, to imagine people when they were little. A lot of the stuff we experienced as children comes out in our grown up lives. You can see it in our gestures, you can see it in how we respond in social situations and you can often catch it unawares in times of quiet surprise. I’m working on an exhibition called Dry Your Tears which opens

I started this series almost on a whim. Experiences as children sharply determine who we will be as adults. As we mature, we become better at masking those childhood emotions, we build a stronger exterior to smooth the bumpy ride, but underneath, within us all, is still the little boy or girl, never quite believing where we are and what we’re doing. #art #painting #mask #bear #blue #collage #childhood #emotion #child #Green #braidwood #artist #paper #teddy #rayleggott #acryli