Art
No Order Magazine talks with the artist.
Australian artist Gus Eagleton possesses a diverse skill set in contemporary large-scale mural painting. He graduated from the Queensland College of Art and Design in 2013. Gus has exhibited and produced large-scale works garnering national and international recognition. His work focuses on and explores people's everyday lives, blending figuration to create aesthetically pleasing, visually compelling narratives.
How did your career begin?
My artistic background has a foundation in fine art. I grew up in a small town called Coffs Harbour. There wasn't really an artistic community, but I really enjoyed drawing, painting and art in high school and I always just felt like I wanted to develop a career in a creative industry. At a relatively young age, I decided that I wanted to be an artist and that I was going to go full steam ahead. I wanted to move somewhere that would allow me to study and get the skills and develop my artistic practice to the best that I could. Originally I was going to move to Sydney, but last minute I decided to switch to Brisbane because I had a couple of friends that were coming up here too. I studied at Griffith University, did a little bit of TAFE as well, and some extracurricular activities.
When I was living in Coffs, I didn't really know anything about graffiti or street art. However, when I started studying in Brisbane and catching the train every day, I saw a lot of graffiti on the tracks and trains. I was just kind of blown away by it. I didn't really understand what it was or what it was about or how they did it. I remember a train pulling up and had a nice end to end with characters and stuff. I was like, what the hell? Why is this here? What is it? I guess that kind of sparked my interest in graffiti and street art.
While I was at TAFE, I was there with Sofles. I think John Kaye was there for a little bit too with a few of those Gold Coast guys and a lot of great graffiti writers. At that time it was very graffiti focused - Iron Lak were doing videos, online blogs were popping off and it was becoming quite popular. I kind of caught on to all of that and made friends with everybody at TAFE, resulting in me trying out graffiti. I got to the point where I kind of could do graffiti relatively okay. I decided I would try and bring my art into a larger format, using aerosol and all of the graffiti techniques that I'd learned to paint.
I definitely have a set process, one that I've kind of developed since I started painting large scale. The foundation of my work is in photography and Photoshop. I usually have some kind of idea or some kind of or even a specific wall that I'm trying to design for, allowing me to come up with ideas or relevant concepts that's going to suit the space. I would usually do a couple of photo shoots that’s relevant to the artwork or things that I find interesting. I collage it all together in Photoshop - I'll have somewhat of a completed version of the artwork in a digital format and will paint a painting based off of that. Elements could develop during the painting process but the basis of the work is digital.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Do you have any wild stories from your career?
I was painting a lot of abandoned buildings as I wasn't getting any opportunities anywhere else. I was making my own opportunities. I would just find spots in streets which looked like they have graffiti or street art elements within them already. I would put high-vis on, use traffic cones and then just go and paint them, pretending like I was meant to be there. It worked to some degree - most people don't really question it unless you're in a weird spot or you're definitely out of place. One time I was doing that and the building owner walked past and he's like, “mate, what are you doing”? I was like, “just doing some painting”. “Who said you could do this?” “These guys here in the shop said it was cool.” “Well, you can't do this, man, this is my building and that's considered vandalism.” The guy was like, “oh, you got to paint over this.” I got permission to finish it, under the guise that I paint over it after. I just finished up and just left it. He ended up sending someone down to do a shitty buff job, which looked worse than my painting. Luckily I didn't get in any trouble or anything. I just kind of, like, played it cool and got the hell out of there.
Read the full interview in Issue 03
Published: 16th September 2023