Enhanced
`Enhanced’
Exhibition
Last Drop Cafe, Newcastle, NSW.
Dec 2012
In 2012, I presented select images from my Outback trip and a few digital illustrations in a modest exhibition at my dear friend Monique’s Newcastle East cafe, The Last Drop.
The Work:
The Exhibition photos are of houses along the one long street named Beryl (nope, not joking) in Broken Hill, an infamous old mining town in outback Australia.
As I was dawdling along, it struck me that each house was unique and individual in ways I had never before experienced without the aid of LSD, and they each seemed to me like a painting.
When I returned to the family Swagman Brand Motorhome, I cropped and worked on the colours and tones of each photo on my laptop as if it were a painting I’d like to think I could have painted myself or at least someone studying `naive art in prisons movement’ could have replicated.
I began to explore `Cartoony illustration as a creative outlet for things I think about and hope no one else does.
I’ve got a bit of a backlog built up to work through. But a doctor friend I know has prescribed an ointment she/he has said will personally apply.
Candle Light Willy.
Scene from a Cartoon marriage.
Dinky Bo Bo; bought and sold.
A Gilded Opening Night
The exhibition's opening was a glistening night of oily goodness amid a sumptuous spread of dips, chips and homemade Champagne.
For the great unwashed of Newcastle, bathing for the first time in as many months and dressing in their finest livery and oyster pants, they sought to impress the ill-defined of Newcastle society with perplexing stories of the latest ointments to invest in and ask existential questions as to why Waffle Houses never really took off in Australia.
A short two-minute hop, jump and tumble roll from the Waldorf Astoria was the popular in its day, `Last Drop Espresso Bar'. The place to be seen for the `onion eater’ set who had come by boat, not ship, to Newcastle in the early part of the century.
It was rare for the Vanderbuilts to stray far from Parkway Ave though Terry Vanderbuilt was known to willfully wander, if only because of how kind the 1970’s had been to him.
With each in-demand piece of art on sale for an average of around $300,000, it was easy to see how the popular artist broke sales records in the city for the week.
Living hand-to-mouth was socially more acceptable than living mouth-to-hand, as Joyce Rockefella wisely opined to ambitious OnlyFans influencer Sharon Roosevelt whilst nibbling on the locally sourced Pigs in Blankets alongside a Gold Tomato Sauce fountain at the exhibition.
Former Tennis and now pickleball pro Geoff Astor found time to be pursued by a giggling and obsessive Broadway Starlett Alva Vulva.
It was later revealed that Vulva was, in fact, the heiress to the Valve family's Pickled Squid fortune but had changed her name to avoid drawing attention to herself.
Vacationing British Aristocrat, Devlin DeQuiche, bought the prized artwork of the exhibition, the $570,000, Dinky Bo Bo; bought and Sold.
The artwork was a highly fought over affair on the night as its sale descended into violenced between DeQuiche and local Docklands Boss, Jimmy `Don’t look at me’ Blockly.
DeQuiche came out victorious due to a `sloppy one’ planted on the embarrassed union hardman by the cunning aristocrat who, as many noted, was in a non-too-suble state of arousal throughout the unfortunate melae.
Sharon Roosevelt is pictured here with the up-and-coming Hollywood Producer of Gone with the Wind and noted child sex trafficker Irving Thalberg.
As the exclusive Exhibition Opening came to a close, many attendees moved on to the glamorous nightclubs and adult theatre Foyers of Newcastle to continue their night of humiliating those in society who they perceive to be less culturally enlightened.