Art
No Order Magazine talks with the artist.
Jordan: I'm Jordan, and this is Steve and we are the Brightsiders. We mainly paint murals, but I guess a big part of our work is connecting with the community and trying to create murals that are visually and emotionally accessible. This can be a water tower, silos or it might be a small wall in a laneway that not many people see.
How did your career begin?
Jordan: We both come from graffiti, which I think informs a lot of our work in a way that you might not see straight away. There's that urge to be involved in the landscape. There's a lot of advertising, there's a lot of visual information out there and I think that we, like graffiti artists, want to be part of that visual information.
Falco: As a duo, I was a ring-in on a job that someone pulled out of. We ended up finding that we worked well together and we enjoyed ourselves - it was a good fit. So, then we decided to try another job together and that was a good fit. Both of our work ethics, ideas and values aligned, which is probably one of the most important things.
Falco: The very first thing we do when we're doing large scale murals in a community is go to the place, meet the community and its key members. This includes council members, indigenous elders (if we can) and locals to get a feel of the place. It often helps the design process.
Jordan: We want to find that point of connection and then be able to put that connection into the artwork in some way. We try to make sure it's representative of that place through their eyes in some way. I don’t know if there is necessarily anything surprising about our process, but there is a formula to some degree that we follow.
Falco: Something we try to do on all of our mural jobs is take our own photos, and then use Photoshop or Procreate to separate elements, getting inspiration from them. It’s another reason we go to the place before we begin painting - we will go to a town and take maybe 100 photos of all sorts of things and those elements may end up in the mural. We usually break it up into separate parts, and then we can swap files until we come up with a final concept. It’s the same when we are painting. I might be halfway through something and its doing my head in and I’ll go “fuck, do you want to jump on this” and swap to his side. Other times, I’ll do one side in my own style and he’ll do his, and then when we walk away, you don’t even notice the difference.
Image courtesy of the artist.
What are the biggest influences on you guys as creatives?
Jordan: Well, I'm going to start with the graffiti side of things, which for me there's some key people like PUBES, DORPS, SEIKO, and SOFLES. What they were doing with style in Brisbane was a massive influence. In the mural game, there are heavy hitters that I’m always inspired by like Fintan McGee, Guido van Helton and Gus Eagleton. These guys, mates like Steve, Zookeeper, Drapl, Jordache and a lot of people who came through Mayne Line all were influences. I am also influenced by my family and loved ones, oil painters overseas and a mural duo called Telmo Miel from Europe.
Falco: As far as artists go, the two biggest influences for me are CRUEL DIE and AROUZ. Those two burn with any medium, anything they touch they burn. No matter what they put their hand to, they are true artists - it's amazing. Then there are all of the experiences that have happened to me throughout my entire life to get me to this point.
Jordan: We are both fans of small things too - little imperfections of a leaf, colours in the sky or things in nature that are small that go unseen most of the time. What I like about being in a duo is that you’re learning from each other along the way and sharing in momentous experiences; joy, adversity and breakthroughs. We are also able to lean on each other's personal strengths such how I see colour or how Steve sees form.
Are there any wild stories from your career that are memorable to you?
Falco: We were working on some scaffolding and there was a peregrine falcon that lived on the top of the Caboolture water tank.We had to use scaffolding instead of a boom as the bird kept attacking anyone that came close. These peregrine falcons are pretty hardcore, so they scaffold this whole thing just for us to paint. When we got to the top to paint, this peregrine falcon was just circling and swooping us. Everyday we went to work, we’d find these rainbow lorikeet heads all over the jobsite. They are the fastest animal on earth and they bomb dive them - the lorikeets get drunk and silly, and the falcon just bombs them and knocks them out. That was hectic because we had to paint a water tower without seeing what we were painting. The other thing that happened on that job was I dropped a hammer. This hammer flew down and I freaked out. All I was thinking about was Jordan’s wife and kids and how I was going to tell them. He was working with his headphones on and I’m yelling out and this thing went straight past him. I thought I killed him - I've never been that scared in my life. That was the first job we did together.
Read the full interview in Issue 03
Published: 16th September 2023