Powering Up

Description

In conjunction with students from Monterey Secondary Collage, Ghostpatrol created this artwork piece in Thompson Lane, as part of the Big Picture Fest 2022. 'Each student had their own strong ideas about what they wanted to paint to have a voice on the wall. The laneway is buzzing with positivity and good vibes".

Artist: Ghostpatrol, Melbourne

Born in Hobart, Tasmania. works and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Working under the pseudonym Ghostpatrol, David Booth first made a name for himself on the walls of Melbourne’s laneways. Working with ephemeral techniques, by 2007 Booth had built an international reputation and fanbase as a street artist. But Booth’s practice, grounded in a passion for drawing and sketching, has always been split between ephemeral works — street-based works, as well as temporary sculptural and installation works — and works on paper and linen. As a result, Booth sees his practice as floating between the worlds of fine art, commercial design, fan service, large mural painting and commercial collaboration.

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, Booth now works and lives in Melbourne, Australia. The legacy of his childhood environment — Tasmania being an isolated and halcyon island, densely populated with forests and bodies of water — is threaded through Booth’s practice. His imaginary realms feel unearthly, meditative and ethereal; Booth is a creator not of simply works, but entire worlds. His works themselves feel like falling into a daydream; at once intensely familiar and welcoming, and entirely otherworldly. They are alternate realities.

Booth’s finely-drawn worlds are woven in threads of hybrid animals, creatures and characters, pop culture references and childhood nostalgia. Booth’s workspaces often turn, as he works, into small shrines; indulging and entering the realm he is conjuring. The whimsical and innocent qualities of his works ostensibly belie their conceptual concerns with metaphysics, cosmic scale, curiosity-led science, quantum physics and futurism. Booth’s iconic visual language invites us to see beyond the scale of our earthly existence and the limits of our own atomic configuration.

Booth’s ongoing explorations are focusing, at present, on ambitious installation and painting projects and other multimedia experiments, often working collaboratively. These passion projects — among them, the Hepburn Wind Farm and the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne — inform Booth’s studio practice and gallery work, and reflect the artist’s social and environmental conscience.

Big Picture Fest 2022
Thompson Lane, Frankston 
You can see this piece on a Street Art Walking Tour: Street Art Walking Tours (discoverfrankston.com)