This month I asked Fiksate’s Dr Suits to look back over the month of September. While normally this series highlights events and additions to the streets, guest contributors continue to bring a fresh perspective to the experience of living in Christchurch as a creative city. Dr Suits is a compulsive creator, with a prodigious output. His paintings serve as progressive studies that track his ongoing visual evolution. His abstractions are entwined with the surrounding urban environment, and as his list illustrates, he is hyper aware of the intriguing details of the cracked concrete and applications of paint around Christchurch. The direction of influence is unclear, as he suggests: “I’m not sure whether the urban photos inspire my work or my work dictates what I shoot. But I use images of buildings and textures to help with compositions, shapes, forms, textures, line and colour in my work all the time. And when I take photos, I’m looking for content which translates back to my work, so it’s a bit of a circular process.” It is no surprise then, that his list is a collection of intimate snapshots of urban surfaces and how they influence his work, reflections on how we can perceive and recontextualise the aesthetics around us. With that said, in true Dr Suits fashion, he declares dryly: “I try not to over think it to be honest.”
The Contrast of Concrete
I’m into looking at surfaces and seeing how others have interacted with them. I get satisfaction from the angle of line someone made when they cut and fixed the concrete footpath, the contrast of the old and new surface material really interests me. It’s not something I usually talk about with my mates though: “Yo, check out the change of the angle in that line in the concrete, that’s nice!”
The Buff Squad
As much as I love urban art and graf, I really do appreciate how layers of buff form abstract compositions on buildings. The different shades of grey that never match, often in square or rectangular arrangements. They are often accidentally beautiful. The buff squad should have their own Instagram feed. If they do can you send me the tag? I’m literally checking now to see if they do…
Diagonal Lines
Then there’s diagonal lines, I love them. In the physical world they are everywhere. They are designed to stand out and grab our attention. I have used them quite a lot in my work over the past few years and I’m constantly exploring the dynamic impact they can have in a composition.
Yellow All Around
Yellow is super visible, and from a long distance. Yellow cuts through. I like yellow lines. Yellow traffic poles, yellow road markings, yellow lines. Yellow is bloody great. It appears in my work regularly, especially in combination with black.
What is This Wizardry?
I was down at the Thompson Park skate bowl in North New Brighton. It had recently been buffed out PEEEP grey (if you know, you know). Some absolute fucking genius had used a black spray can to mark out all the seam lines in the concrete to highlight the wizardry behind the intricate shapes used to form the skate bowl. Now this is urban abstract art at its finest…
Dr Suits will be featured in Fiksate’s upcoming exhibition Urban Abstract, which will also feature Elliot O”Donnell, TOGO, Levi Hawken, Tepid and Pener… Opening October 25th (more to come on that!)…
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