Happy Friday Maddabling Readers, I hope your weeks have been a good ones.
This week it is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you all the super talented Paul Deej, the WA artist and designer from Toasted Designs and the Syllabolix collective.
When I first started to browse through Paul's amazing artwork, a few things grabbed seriously grabbed my attention. I am a bit of a shoe girl so it should be no surprise that I love these painted boots...awesomeness....
and I have a fascination with owls at the moment too - absolutely smitten with this painting......
And when I saw this mural, it rekindled teenage memories of a trip to Melbourne where I first saw "real" street art; brightly coloured murals painted in the city, don't you think this mural is just sublime!
Readers, I am now passing on the blogging baton to Paul - to give you all of The Dirt on Paul Deej. I hope you enjoy reading Paul's story as much as I did. Wishing you all a wonderful weekend and don't forget to do something fun!
P.S. please remember that Paul has given his permission for these images to be used in this blog post. Please respect his work and do not copy, use, reproduce these images, in full or in part without Paul's express permission.
The Dirt on Paul Deej
My name is Paul Deej, artist and designer from Toasted Designs and the collective known as Syllabolix. I paint album covers, canvases, murals, pretty much anything I can get my hands on.
I started out at a very young age drawing dinosaurs, and then moved on to comics where I would obsessively copy the artwork. I started with Footrot Flats and ones like that, as I got older moving on to Judge Dredd, 2000AD and eventually Marvel. I always wanted to be a comic book artist, and I read that a lot of artists had a background in graphic design, so I went to TAFE and got my advanced diploma in that.
My good mates are musicians in the hip hop scene, and from that I started doing quick little gig posters for them which led on to painting album covers which really got me interested in painting for a living. To begin with I was a digital artist, I would sketch then scan it in and paint it digitally as I hated the mess of mixing paint and cleaning up. 10 odd years later I have switched, and most of my artwork now is done traditionally on canvas or paper. I still love to paint digitally though for certain jobs as I like the style it gives my work.
Other than painting in Photoshop, I primarily work in acrylics. I use brushes but also love using paint markers, the Molotow One4All markers specifically. When painting a canvas I will use a mix of aerosol, acrylics and markers to create the finished piece. I also love painting murals with all spray cans as it is a great medium to use and gives amazing results.
I would say I am inspired by beauty first and foremost, a lover of the female form, and I am trying to capture the 'perfect' image of beauty in my artwork. On the other side of this is my fascination of the opposite, of the evil and unappealing. I love movies, horror movies in particular, and I am very influenced by these as well as novels and comic books.
I also find competition to be very inspiring, even in a small city like Perth the talent level is amazingly high and it would be easy to get disillusioned by it all, but I see it as a challenge. I love checking out other peoples work and it drives me to be a better and more creative artist. I have many extremely talented and driven friends that are always motivating me with their own success and creativity as musicians and artists. And of course my wife and my kids.
I do a lot of commissioned work, so when I get time to paint for myself or work on an exhibition, I mainly paint girls. I love to paint from the heart and not think about it or analyse it, do no planning, and just grab a black canvas and see what happens.
At the moment my favourite piece I have done was from my recent exhibition, a painting of a young 'steampunk' style girl called 'Telex'. That one just seemed to work from the start, I love the look in her eye.
Some of my other favourite pieces I have done are the album art I did for the band Downsyde called 'All City', and the album art for 'Monster House' that I did for my friend Hunter.
My plans for the future are to keen evolving my work and my style. My main goals for the moment are getting as much quality artwork out there as quick as possible. I plan on switching to oil paints to give that a try, and I would love to paint more walls. Bigger the better.
Dear readers, do you want to own a piece of Paul's artwork or explore it his creations some more ? Here is how you can connect:
Become a follower on facebook here:
www.facebook.com/deejo1
and check out his websites here:
www.eldeejo.com
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