Priceless Details

The opening was an incredible success, I am so happy lots of people came, friends brought their friends, and my family flew in for the occasion. The speech by Prof. Steve Dixon, was touching on the main issues of my work, presented in a beautiful mixture of Michel Foucault and light-hearted down to earth humour. And the weird obnoxious guy on the phone who end up singing random money songs is a good friend who's also a Tenor for hire. This was our little silly way of adding a twist into an already awesome night. You can contact Mik Rossi here for singing gigs. 
And now, here's some details of some of the individual artworks. A few of them have sold now and I've already begun the 'what's next' of the series. Stay tuned for more updates on that in the next article. 


Naturally One Manolo and the Greenback Manolo's are of the famous shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. His shoes was made ultra popular in the early 2000's by the TV series Sex and The City. Some of my portraits focuses on designers and people in the industry who are often unseen or their names precedes the person. Some of you might have a pair or two of Manolo Blahnik. Well here's what he looks like. There are symbolism behind the numbers. One being the first number that projects and proposes the one and only, the ultimate, the first!  This piece has sold. 

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The greenback series, are all done with watercolour and prisma pencils, the focus is obvious, the colour green that symbolises the American greenbacks, here the colour is used in a much brighter hue, not the dark green in the US Dollars. The portrait is of Vogue editor extraordinaire Anna Wintour. She is known best as the woman which inspired the book and movie Devils Wear Prada, and was wonderfully dramatised by Meryl Streep. There's also a documentary based on her called The September Issue. She's iconic because she's also known to have never changed her page boy bob hairstyle and wears the sunglasses indoors, in runway shows and everywhere. Here's a small snippet of her and her personality. In my historic past, when living in NY and working in the garment district. I have had bosses like her. Her's is quite a character that's often demonised and called the ice queen, however I highly appreciate the no-nonsense work ethics. The warmth and small talks we project to others is often how we want to be treated by others, and some are so good at it, it becomes a mere front that doesn't hold much sincerity. In my humble opinion, being direct and real as long as you're sincere and respectful is a good thing. 

This is one of my favourite because she's 92 years old, and she's famous for wearing  avant garde haute couture. Here she's wearing the beautiful butterfly headdress by Alexander McQueen. You can read about Savage Beauty, an exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art about 3 years ago of Alexander McQueen's designs by blogger Garance Dore, here. The story of Alexander McQueen is a tragic one. The headdress was actually produced for McQueen by the famous Miliner Phillip Treacy. This design was inspired by the Singaporean Samsui Woman, the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock print and of course influenced heavily by Art Deco. Kinda random? Indeed...That's how I roll. 
This piece has also sold. 

This large scale illustration is of Alexander McQueen, and I'd rather call it an epilogue, rather then an homage because what his story represents is tragic yet so common in the history of tormented geniuses, they end up taking their own life. The artwork felt like an epilogue, because there are words not yet articulated that will forever remain silent after his death. The piece was a departure from only using ink, and moving towards illustration techniques and use in the end a combined process on rice paper. I enjoyed producing the typography for the letters, it's one extreme remove from abstraction and the change on abstraction is subtle in the serial numbers of all the bank note illustrations.  


Every pieces of bank notes has it's story. I shall be writing about a whole other selection in the next blogs. Meanwhile, enjoy these stories.