I am always on the lookout for art that I haven’t covered, since I tend to lean heavily towards illustration and paintings. So when I stumbled upon Alex Gillies via my post on Murdoch Stafford, I was stoked to see that not only do I love his prints, but he is doing something out of the ordinary by making hand-carved woodblock relief prints. My intro to his work was through his collaboration piece with Murdoch for a show at Nine Lives Gallery in Brisbane, where Alex carved and printed one of his massive illustrations – a piece called “When the Demon Knife Weeps”. To say that carving out each minute detail of this epic piece would be difficult is an understatement. And Gillies has only been working with woodcuts for the past three years. So yeah, pretty impressive. A perusal of his blog and gallery of works also found me in awe of the depth of his prints, both emotionally and artistically. Although Gillies doesn’t always create with the macabre in mind, a lot of his work features dark subject matter and the black space in his prints highlights the sense of loneliness and despair that many of his pieces invoke recognition of in the viewer. They are a stark view of reality, literally so when it comes to his “Feel Free to Laugh” series, which juxtaposes disturbing images of 20th century wars with TV show titles like “WWII – The Biggest Loser” or “Vietnam – Big Brother (Eviction Special).” I appreciate his sense of humor, especially when I live in a country that has existed in a state of constant war for at least the past 10 years (some would, correctly, say the past century), and yet American Idol gets a far better voter turnout than the Presidential elections. Not that there’s anything to vote for, we should just tear the whole system down, but that discussion is for a later date. For now, check out Gillies’ carved woodflesh prints, and also a look behind the scenes of his and Murdoch’s “When the Demon Knife Weeps”…
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