Beastman on Future Origins, fatherhood and learning to paint big

Beastman is the name Bradley Eastman paints under, and in 2014 it is one of the most recognisable signatures in Australian painting outside the gallery system and, increasingly, inside it. His pictures are built from repeated forms: concentric bands, symmetrical growths, crisp organic lines that look as though they were measured with a compass and then allowed to sprout. He has shown across Australia and in the UK, the United States, Germany, Hong Kong and New Zealand, and he spends much of his time on two side projects that have done a good deal for the Sydney scene.

With a new solo show about to open at Backwoods Gallery on Easey Street in Collingwood, Melbourne, he spoke to the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost about the exhibition, his background and the rest of his year.

From skate graphics to a first solo show

He grew up in the Sydney suburbs, he said, and skateboarding was everything. Drawing came early and never stopped, but it was skating that led him into taking photographs and shooting video with his friends, and from there into the look of the culture itself: the deck graphics, the logos, the way the brands in the magazines presented themselves and brought in artists and photographers. The graffiti he passed on the street went into the same mental folder.

After school, in the late 1990s, he studied graphic design and worked as a designer for years, with drawing, skate photography and painting running on the side. He placed the turning point at around 2005, when he felt the work had become his own and wanted people to see it. Group shows followed, then in 2008 his first solo show, in Sydney, and he described the years since as a steady roll forward.

A visual language

Asked to sum the work up, he called it a visual language: an exploration of style, colour, living forms, design and precision that keeps developing. The patterns, palette and geometry all come from nature. The figures that recur in the paintings he thinks of as deities of a future nature, beings sprung from the earth as if the natural world had come alive in some way no one could have foreseen.

He had recently become a father for the first time. That had not altered the pictures or the style, he said, but it had changed his attitude to life and made him work harder and waste less time.

Future Origins

The Backwoods show, running from 16 May, is his most varied yet: new paintings in acrylic and ink on wooden panels, an installation covering a whole wall, a big limited edition print, a sculptural piece and a short animation. He explained that the point was to show how he makes the work and how the same language carries across acrylic, aerosol, digital illustration, sculpture and moving image. The title refers to the idea behind the whole body of work, new forms of life and the question of where they came from and how they grow.

The acrylic panels are slow, and he admitted as much, but he said he enjoys the process. Each medium brings its own strengths and limits and its own set of expectations, and the trick is to use them together with enough confidence that the result reads as one coherent show.

Galleries first, walls later

Most painters in this corner of the world come in from the street. Beastman went the other way. He was already showing in galleries before he painted a mural, and he said he did not feel confident working in public until his style and characters were developed enough to stand up at that scale. The past few years of large aerosol walls, often painted with other artists, have pushed him harder than anything, and he named the painters who taught him how to go big and try new things: Vans the Omega, Yok, Numskull, Phibs and Roach. As far as he is concerned the artwork does not change between wall and panel, only the materials, and he tries to paint murals as cleanly as he can so they carry the same punch as a small painting or a vector drawing.

The Hours and East Editions

East Editions is a business he started recently with his wife, a way to build something of their own around a shared interest in art, design, furniture and homewares. The idea is to bring artists and makers together on handmade, limited edition objects that put art into people’s homes by other routes. So far that has meant hand-painted furniture and screen-printed quilt covers and cushions, with sculpture, lamps, publications and prints to come. A furniture release with Roach had just gone out, and pieces with Luke Taaffe, Numskull and Vans the Omega were in hand.

The Hours is the collective he runs with Numskull and Marty Routledge. They curate exhibitions with Australian and visiting artists, put out limited edition shirts, organise mural painting events and festivals, and look after commercial mural work for clients. He said the aim throughout is to make openings for local painters and to bring good artists over, and he was happy to say he thinks it has made a difference in Sydney and beyond.

Perth, and the rest of 2014

Earlier in the year he spent a week in Perth for PUBLIC, the public art project run by FORM, painting a large wall with Vans the Omega. The line-up around them drew in Roa, Phlegm, Hyuro, Gaia, 2501, Ever, Maya Hayuk, Alexis Diaz, Sheryo, Remed, Phibs and Yok, among others. He was clearly impressed by FORM’s ambition and glad to have been part of it.

His advice to anyone starting out was blunt. There is no scene, he said, only the one you build for yourself. Take the time to develop the work before showing it; being an artist is about progress over years, adapting the work as life changes, and anything rushed shows. After that, work harder than everyone you know.

He was proudest of his son Eamon. After Backwoods, the year held a solo show at Above Second in Hong Kong in September, mural projects, some work with Element, more from The Hours and a run of East Editions releases. His wife was expecting their second child, and he expected to spend the end of the year, in his words, deep in “the dad zone”.