Join the Parade with Sean Whelan July 24 2024

Interview by Brittany Drysdale. Images supplied by Sean Whelan.

What was your favourite part and biggest challenge when creating this showcase?

My favourite part was the moment I lined up all the paintings at the end of the eight months of work and saw them for the first as one large parade. It was the motivation behind the series, and making it happen was also the biggest challenge.

At the start, I had a lot of difficulty choosing which part of the parade to begin with, but once I committed to the first piece and finished it, ideas for the next began to flow. I hope people enjoy finding and following these common threads through the work when they see it.

 How do the pieces in this show differ from your previous works? 

Because the idea was to create my own parade, I had to think really carefully about how each painting worked on its own and as part of a group. The relationship between them was really important to the concept, so it feels like one enormous eight panel painting to me, with links made through the characters, colours and motifs. Working in such a controlled way is something I’ve never attempted do in a series before.

I feel like I’ve pushed my style in new directions, too. My previous work has been static and rooted to the spot - feeling more like buildings or statues - but in this series I wanted to introduce movement using soft, curved, pulled, tied, stretched and squeezed shapes to simulate the bobbling and jostling of the figures and parade floats across the landscape of the paintings.

The result is a set of paintings that work individually, and in the context of this show, together as a parade, that will pass by when the show comes to an end.

What do you hope to communicate to people when they view your showcase?

I want people to enjoy the act of looking at this series and feel a sense of excitement and curiosity.

Parades can celebrate the changing of seasons, a date in a spiritual calendar, a political message, the passage of time or the end of life. They are common across all cultures as a way to share traditions, beliefs, solidarity or celebrate someone or something significant in a creative way. I’ve seen, and experienced, the feeling of taking part in many different types of parades, and sharing this feeling was a strong driver for this series.

In Parade!, I use this motif to playfully explore a collection of my own reflections on life, inspired by joy, love, strength, weakness, vulnerability, frustration, conflict, and fear, and celebrate it. Personifying these emotions into hyper-colored costumed figures and creating impossible vehicles and floats feeds some of the nostalgia I feel for parades, and is cathartic in a way. I can take a step back and just enjoy the spectacle.

 Who or what is your biggest influence in your practice?

I came to painting via design, so in the beginning a lot of my first influences came from graphic designers and the artists that grew out of the experimental computer graphics and illustration scene of the early 2000s.

When I was at art school, I spent most of my time studying typography and design in print and web, with a foot in illustration, and a toe in painting.

The library had a subscriptions to some great design magazines, like I.D. and IDEA (アイデア) which sat at the intersection of all these things.

They covered design across music, film, video games and early internet culture with the kind work that I’d never seen here in Australia, or any place in the world of design as I understood at the time. With the explosion in computer-based design and the internet, influence could and did come from anywhere and boundaries between creative practices and cultures seemed to get a bit blurred.

It was the first place I saw design as more art-like and illustration crossing over into the fine-art world. These magazines are where I discovered The Designer’s Republic, eBoy, James Jarvis, Devil Robots, Michael Lau and contemporary Japanese heavyweights like Yoshitomo and Murakami, which made me think more about making art instead of becoming a designer.

After graduating, my curiosity in graphics and art took me to Japan, where I spent a decade immersed in the culture and language, learning about the origins of the work I admired, and finding more.

Some of my favourite artists during this time were Aida Makoto, Manabu Ikeda, Masakatsu Sashie, Tenmyouya Hisashi and Yamaguchi Akira, and I started to see how the speed of life, the push-and-pull of tradition and modernity, the complex social contracts, the long shadow of the war and the intense competition for eyes in a visually-over stimulating landscape had translated into art with a hyper-attention to detail that mirrored and parodied contemporary life. I was very influenced by this. I was also absolutely obsessed with the manga of Taiyo Matsumoto (Tekkon Kinkreet) and Otomo Katsuhiro (Akira).

Looking at my work now, there are still parts that I can trace back to this time, but nowadays I’m more interested in traditional western art for inspiration. Especially the paintings of Rubens, Bruegel and Bosch. One, for the powerful narratives they weave through their work – which are timeless – and two, for their surrealist, representative style and the way they paint figures, which is unconventional and ugly, but somehow makes me love them even more.

Can you describe the process of your practice? How do you come up with your ideas and how do you execute them?

Design has had a big influence on my process too. I spend a lot of time working out the concept and the sketching up a composition in my sketchbook before I get to the painting stage. It’s still the longest step in the process, but I’d say about 90% of the decisions have already been made before I start.

I keep an open mind about where ideas can come from. I consume my fair share of media, high and low. I enjoy genre films, historical documentaries, fringy and alt-pop electronic music, comics, animation and podcasts about technology. My personal experiences and perspectives shape my ideas too. I watch politics closely, I try to keep across current affairs as much as I can, and I’m concerned about the environment and where technology is taking us. I try to hold these things as best as I can while being pragmatic about the influence I have.

There is a crossover of all these ideas with my practice, but I’m not convinced this list of inspirations comes together as fully formed ideas consciously.

My approach is to put as much as possible in, and let the right trigger rearrange all this raw material I’ve been collecting into something new to work with.

Some unlikely references for this series came from books I found in the local library on ornamental porcelain figurines, 1960s British motorcycles and personal photographs, so it’s hard to say exactly where the inspiration can come from and how it will spark new ideas for paintings – I just let the feelings lead the way. 

What is your favourite medium to work with and why?

Acrylic paint on wood or canvas.

The vibrancy of the colours and the flat finish you can get from using acrylics can make a painting feel more like an object. I can get the precision I want, and with practice I’ve learned to blend them to create smooth gradients using brushes. I am very interested in the finish of the final artwork and want it to feel like it’s been crafted with care. 

For this series, consistency was really important too. I really wanted the colour to be bold, bright and link the paintings with a common palette. So to do this, I premixed my colours (44 in total) to cover the light and dark values for each hue I planned to work with. Setting these parameters gave me very clear boundary to work within and really helped unify the eight paintings, which was key to the concept.

In the future, I’d really like to explore more three-dimensional work, and realise these figures in different materials. One of my other early interests was designer toys and sofubi (soft-vinyl). To be able to do that someday would be a dream!

What draws you to your signature colourfully surrealist style and how did you first establish this unique style?

I love bold, bright colors, and I get a lot of visual satisfaction from working with them, especially colors that instantly draw your eye – like hot pinks, reds, and oranges. Experimenting and combining them opens up possibilities, and the way I’m using them in Parade! feels like a new point in the evolution of my use of color and what it means in my work.

When I was in Japan, I was mostly working in black and white using pencil and ink, drawing very intricate pictures of traditional buildings, public infrastructure, concrete playground equipment, and street signage. At some stage, I started to introduce bright color, mainly for contrast and as a simple motif representing ‘the new.’

The colors I used were inspired by the sculptural concrete slides and obstacle courses of children’s playgrounds, which were notable for their ‘so-bad-they-were-good’ color combinations. The outsider art style of these structures, likely built en masse, looked like something a fan of Gaudi could have designed, and their flowing shapes were the perfect opposite of the traditional buildings I was drawing. Over time, these curved concrete shapes started to become more of a focus, and the compositions began taking on human forms, transforming from static structures to free-standing and animated figures.

The reasons for using color evolved too. Bright colors are attractive. We see them in nature, our built environment, advertising, and all around us to convey our personality. Pop art is defined by its use of bright colors, and there is a whole science dedicated to color psychology. But in my paintings, I like to use color aesthetically as a way to draw attention to narratives. Some of these narratives are joyful and uplifting, while others are not. I find the tension between what we are attracted to and what it actually means very interesting.

So, while the roots of my colorful style are in the black-and-white traditional buildings and the weirdness of the concrete playgrounds I was drawing many years ago, I feel like it has become its own language and is pushing in new directions. I’m excited about continuing my experiments with colour and the ways I can use it tell new stories.

In a world where it’s hard to stand out, how do you as an artist maintain your individuality?

Being honest and making art from a place of honesty is probably the only way to maintain our individuality and stand out, isn’t it?

I’ve had unique experiences and I’ve developed my own tastes over time. I also have a passion for the craft that goes into my work. So, I think I can claim these things collectively as uniquely mine. It’s also what I admire in other people’s work. When they can synthesize the sum of their experiences and influences and tell me who they are through their practice – that really stands out to me.

What is the best advice you have received from a fellow artist and what advice would you like to pass on to others?

A friend of mine once said to me, “there is always another painting,” and that was a good reminder that the work is never done. 

Advice for other artists? Surround yourself with people that understand you and know what you want to do. Don’t work in isolation. A creative community to work with, learn from and lean on for support is essential, and building these relationships is the only way to share and develop your practice.