The following is from Shaun Tan's website:
(click on the red word above to link to Shaun Tan's website).

Shaun Tan grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as the 'good drawer' which partly compensated for always being the shortest kid in every class. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works as an artist and author in Melbourne.

Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. 

I wanted to post at least one more blog before my show, Everything
AND Nothing, opens next week. There are so many great artists who've inspired and influence me over the years. It would be impossible to list them all.

I've made the distinction between influence and inspiration. There are artists who have impacted the way I work. Seeing their work changed or influenced the way I make art. There are other artists who inspire me. Their style or themes haven't necessarily impacted the way I work but they feed my imagination, excite me, inspire me.

What I like about Frida's work is the emotional honesty, combined with sardonic humour, cooked up in a cauldron of magic realism. Seeing her work recently at the AGO in Toronto, I was struck by the delicacy and subtly of her brush work. That's not something that comes through in photographs. I've always thought of her work as stiff and a bit primitive in execution. Photos just don't do them justice. Healing and transformation have been important themes for me, and Frida's work has it in spades.

This is one of my favourite Stanley Spence paintings. About twelve years ago I began work on a series of dream-like narrative paintings called Manifest Density. Along with Steven Campbell, Stanley Spencer was one of my biggest influences. The light in this painting is so perfect, so intoxicating. The composition, in my opinion, is also perfect. Your eye enters along the edge of the fence up into the centre of the scene, touches upon the various characters, out along the ridge of trees and escapes out through that little smidge of blue along the horizon. I love Spencer's large crazy narratives as well. I love the fact that he's re-staged famous biblical scenes in the neighbourhoods he lived in. I'm not so fond of his quirky sausage-shaped people, but at the time, was inspired by his attempts to go beyond classical figuration to create something personal and eccentric.

I was first attracted to Paula Rego's abstract work. Especially the acrylic collaged paintings from the 1960s and early 70's, then her loose expressive figure work in the 1980's. At first I wasn't so keen on her pastel drawings of figures. I appreciated their masterful execution but wasn't drawn to them (pun intended). Nowadays, though, I find myself returning to those amazing pastel drawings like the one above. I'm a real sucker for large scale, multi-figure narratives and this one fits the bill.

I don't know much about Julie Heffernan but have been seeing  a lot of her amazing surrealistic narratives lately, on the internet and in magazines. I love the combination of traditional renaissance painting with modern, utopian/apocalyptic themes.

Joe Coleman is one of the most famous and celebrated "outsider" artists in the world. His whacked out fever dreams are wild and extreme. They can be autobiographical, about historic figures such as Sigmund Freud, Charles Manson or Hank Williams, or horror movie scenes. While his themes don't always speak to me, I find his fearlessness inspiring. A painting can be about anything and everything.

Two weeks to go until I install my show at loop gallery. I continue to struggle with the nagging obligation of writing an artist's statement and preparing for an artist's talk.

Here's the thing. I make art (drawing, painting, sculpture, digital imagery) to explore the world that lives just beyond the boundary of words, the ineffable, I suppose. It's not that I don't like to write, because I do. It just feels wrong to have to explain in words what needs to be expressed in images. It's like making a really tasty meal, and instead of eating it, you're given the recipe to read.
 
The show probably should be called Everything and Nothingness, but I didn't want to get too deeply into the Buddhist doctrine of nothingness.
There's very little about my work that is overtly Buddhist. However, at the core of these drawings is the paradox that is stated in  The Heart Sutra;

form is emptiness, emptiness is form

If you click on (this red) Heart Sutra you can read the full text. The paradox cannot be understood in any logical way. It must be experienced through meditation and devotional practice. Having said that, here's my superficial understanding of the Sutra. All form arises out of the limitless void (nothingness). They have relative meaning depending on what co-arises with it, but, ultimately, has no inherent meaning. All forms rise, dissolve, only to rise again as another form. Not sure if any of that comes through in the drawings, but it's there, lurking between the lines.

Another Buddhist concept that informs my work is that of Interconnectedness. I am especially interested in the notion of life unfolding simultaneously in many dimensions. These drawings are teaming with figures, images, beings, activities, cells, words, shapes... interdependently co-arising and dissolving. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

OK, so I'm starting to see the value in writing about art. It's like taking a lump of wet clay (thoughts) and forming them into some semblance of structure (meaning).

The above painting is one of my favourites. It is dreamlike and menacing. Front, and slightly off-centred, are double self-portraits. Both with bandaged heads. The younger doppelganger's bandages act as a mask. In the middle ground, shadowy figures, without pants, wield belts or snakes, one rides a bicycle. They appear threatening but also vulnerable, maybe even pathetic, upon closer inspection. Horses and riders gallop through the sky. With a fairly muted palette (blue, yellow, black and grey), Eyre controls the mood of the painting with the precision of the best cinematographers.

There's something cold, analytical, even digital in Eyre's paintings. Perhaps due to fact that they're painted in acrylic. The paradox contained within these paintings is that something vague, mysterious and indecipherable is rendered with such precision and clarity.

A survey of works going back to the early 60's can be found below.

I have always been partial to British painters. My earliest influences, as a student in the early 80's, included David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Patrick Proctor and Lucien Freud. Eventually, their influences were replaced by the emerging German and Italian artists in the mid-eighties. You know, the usual suspects, Kiefer, Immendorf, Clemente, Paladino, etc. But then, one day, in the late 1990's, I was shopping for art books and came across The New British Painting.

That's where I first saw Steven Campbell's painting called A Salty Tale: In a Drought a Man Saves a Whale by his Perspiration and Tears, 1985. Everything you need to know about Campbell is right there in that title. The whimsy, the monumental symbolism of the whale, layers of personal and universal meaning. It might as well be called Blood, Sweat and Tears. I was hooked. My own work began to shift.

This is the first large-scale narrative painting I did called From Mud to Miracle. Campbell's influence here is obvious. The absurd dreamlike scenario, odd figures making strange gestures. Like a dream, I'm sure there are layers of "meaning" in there. I'm not particularly interested in de-coding its meaning. I'm more interested in creating psycho-spiritual tableaux where life can unfold in all its multi-dimensional complexity. I've include two more paintings by Steven Campbell that I love as well as a link to other online examples of his work.

Steven Campbell was a Scottish painter who didn't study art until his mid-twenties, after a few years working in a factory. He was part of new wave of figurative artists who emerged in the 1980's that became knowns as The Glasgow Boys. Campbell moved to New York and became something of an Art Star for a while. However, he was unhappy in New York and soon moved back to Scotland where he promptly disappeared from the international scene. A fabulous book on Campbell's paintings by Duncan MacMillan was published in 1993. Unfortunately, Campbell died of a ruptured appendix on 15 August 2007, aged 54. The only known video footage of him that I could find is here on Youtube.

To see more amazing paintings by Steven Campbell, check out this site.

On November 24th, my next show at loop, Everything AND Nothing (drawings large and small) will open. I will be sharing the gallery with Barbara Rehus (see image below). As I push to finish a couple of pieces for the show I am beginning to formulate an artist statement. Today, while perusing a book on Max Beckmann, I fell upon this statement from the artist, which seemed quite apropos;

"I assume that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifest-ations of life which may sometimes coincide, but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you to decide which is more important.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible. like the famous kabbalist who said 'If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.'

My aim is alway to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer reality into painting - to make the invisible visible through reality. It may sound paradoxical but it is in fact, reality which forms the mystery of our existence."

Beckmann's words echo my intentions with this work. My current body of work focuses on drawing and various permutations of the drawing process. Drawing is direct, spontaneous, immediate and visceral. The act of drawing creates a direct channel to the imagination, to the unconscious. I do not predetermine what will emerge from my pencil or charcoal. I let the imagery come on its own accord.

This act of drawing has led me back to figurative, representational imagery. Inspired and influenced by metaphysical and alchemistic art, surrealism, magic realism, historical illustration and contemporary realism, I have been creating large-scale narratives with a numinous, dreamlike quality. One could call them psycho-spiritual tableaux.  Bosch and Brueghal are obvious influences here. But contemporary artists such as Sandow Birk and Steven Campbell also inform my work.