Apparently my local supermarket doesn't believe in either Halloween or selling pumpkins that aren't pre-cut into portions, so this year I reverted to the far older British tradition of carving turnips to create lanterns to ward off the bad ghosts.

Turnips are much easier to carve and have a lovely luminosity when you hollow them out enough.

Excited today about this artist, Know Hope.

The other exhibition that happened in my absence was Ugly, Drunk and Stupid at the Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn, Victoria.

Curated by Jo Waite and Bernard Caleo the exhibition was part of the 2008 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

The format for the show was a portrait of an "Ugly, Drunk, Stupid" character and a landscape format comic featuring this character.

I decided to use as the starting point the caricature of Paris Hilton I drew during one the Zine Cloud word game exercises back in June where I ended up with the words "Paris Hilton, "Smoking" and "Sword".

The resulting comic is the first I've done in a long time that aims to be funny and has a lot of words. Overall I was pretty happy with it.

Broken windows aside the opening apparently when well with a fine collection of secondhand sherry glasses provided by Jo.

"Pat’s favourite comic: A tie between Sarah Howell’s silent comic and Tim Molloy’s Mr Unpronounceable."

- from curator Pat Grant's wrap up email (this email totally made my day).

Images 1. single panel detail.
Image 2. installation shot of exhibition, mine is the very white three page comic sandwiched between Ben Constantine's 12 page work and Mandy Ord's 4 pages.

As I don't normally live on a west coast I get quite excited about seeing the sunset over the ocean. Here are just three King Island sunsets.