For today's interview we speak to local artist and Sydney expat Dan Hewitt about Sydney, the lockdown experience, making do with the tools you have and the hidden art of glaziers stickers. Q: First of all Dan thank you for your time today. It is a pleasure to have another person agree to sit down for a chat. Also while I think of it, congratulations on your recent show! D: Thanks for having me and yeah, the show was a launch for a split zine that I worked on with a good friend of mine. It featured the work of Atomic, Kaput, Moola and myself. We decided for the launch it would be as good an opportunity as any to do an art exhibition - so we got some people around and had a bit of fun. Q: It’s a nice zine, real punchy - I was surprised to see it was cut and pasted together by hand, which felt very old school! The show had a great location too, seeing the trains thunder past over the back fence gave a great ambience. (Shout out to Silk+Squeeg for the venue) Untitled, Dan Hewitt Sulphurism launch event (2023) Q: Have you taken part in any exhibitions before? D: I’ve done a few in Sydney with some friends of mine under the term collective ground floor. There's a building in the city that no one really cares about that we can do our thing in and no one hassles us. I’ve also done a few little group shows in Brisbane. Q: So you had to put together a body of work for this, how was that process? D: It was interesting, I tried to go with the flow and not put too much pressure on myself or stress too much. I had a really good group of people helping me too which made it a lot easier. Q: This might be the first show up here I’ve personally seen you in, but you’ve been building a following for the last year or two in Brisbane. From what I hear though you haven’t been in town for too long - where’d you move from? D: I’ve been living here for about three years by now. I moved up from Sydney with my family somewhere in late 2019. Unbeatable? Sydney A set train - photo via Dan Hewitt (2023) Q: Three years, so that would put your move smack bang at the start of lockdown right? D: Yeah, I came just a few months before. I think I had maybe two or three months of normality before Covid pulled up. Q: Man that's rough. Now when I think of Sydney, I think of the big mean city of Australia. The most populated, big brother of all the metropolises we have. As someone who’d moved from that to Brisbane - what kind of differences have you noticed? D: Public transport in Sydney is a lot better, hate to say it but it is. Those double decker trains just can’t be beat. I think Brisbane moves at a bit a slower pace - but not in a bad way! As far as art goes Brisbane is a much better city to start getting into the art world. It’s a lot easier to meet people and kind of enter that world. Q: I wouldn’t have picked that about the art scene - what makes you say that? D: In Brisbane it’s a lot easier to start seeing the same faces and grow connections as far as the art world goes. Once you go to a handful of exhibitions you start seeing and hearing about people who are a common denominator and it’s really easy to start talking to people, meeting them and entering the scene. Whereas in Sydney, at least from what I’ve seen - being that it’s a bigger city it's a lot harder to get your foot in the door. Studio work - photo via Dan Hewitt (2023) Q: I hadn’t really considered that point of view but you’re right - a few events in a row will see the same faces popping up sooner or later. Which - I mean that’s the double edged sword of a smaller scene or city. Q: I’ll leave the eastern city navel gazing behind in a moment but for someone who doesn't live in Sydney - and from a local. What’s it like? D: It’s a lot of fun, there is always something to do and somewhere to go. It’s pretty easy to get yourself into trouble but at the same time it’s a really nice city to navigate in terms of art, music and everything else. There's all these little creative realms that have stuff going on. Obviously Brisbane it’s easier to get involved in but in Sydney it’s easier to observe. Q: Everyone's experiences in lockdown were different, some people lost jobs, some family members - it was a shitter of a time globally really. What was your personal experience like, coming from an interstate move and getting smacked in the face by lockdown? D: It was very jarring, a big move from one city to another that operates differently already forces you to readjust so much and then as well with covid on top. I had to learn to live through it, as everything became a little more confusing. At the time I was painting in a different style which was my creative energy at the time. That became difficult as circumstances changed and I ended up spending much more time at home while confined. I had to find a different way to spend that energy where I could express myself which pushed me to try to take art in a different direction. Before that I’d always drawn but I’d never really taken it seriously, it was like a school subject or something to pass the time. But now I actually tried to paint canvases and it was - pretty bad, to be honest. But it was where I started getting my foot in the door and exploring that world. Studio work - photo via Dan Hewitt (2023) Q: To me that feels like a perfect example of adversity and restrictions forcing creativity and making you work a lot harder with what you have. Some examples of that would be old school video games, music, art - having limitations seems to force evolution that would perhaps otherwise not have happened. D: Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure at some point I would have gotten into art and gone down the path I’m going down now but I don’t know when that would have happened if it wasn’t for being pushed into lockdown where I had to find a new way to express myself. Q: I’ve noticed from what we have seen from your work that you use some interesting tools, like the spray bottle, wash paint effect and a whole lot of sakura markers - can you talk a little bit about that? D: A few of those things were just about taking what I had and using them in different ways. Again, going back to covid I had to think about what I could make with what I had around me. White out, spray bottles, cheap house paint, hobby paint, paper, cheap canvases. It was a process of just seeing what I could create with the materials I had. I also didn’t have much money - still don’t but it was the only way I could start something with what I had on hand. Sydney - photo via Dan Hewitt (2023) Q: A lot of your canvas work feels to me at least, very photographic? D: Most of my paintings that depict a tangible scene of someone painting or sitting down nine times out of ten are from a film photo I’ve taken and used as a base. I don’t copy obviously and they’re nothing close to realism but I try to take elements from the composition and colours and what was happening in the photo, how I feel about it now and mash all of that into the painting to create something new. Q: This might be a stretch but given that you were creating those in lockdown, were you looking back to better times? D: Well, lockdown was when I picked up film and how eventually I came to see it as more valuable. I would take more photos when I visited Sydney to see my friends and get up to mishaps. I just deemed it more important to document that. I didn’t plan to paint from photos, it was just a hobby which led to starting with symbolic abstract stuff which I then evolved. I was shooting film and painting very separately but naturally as I was doing both things, I found a way to combine them and create something new. Q: I came across something the other day talking about how taking photos of the mundane things that you might otherwise overlook in your life will be more valuable later because they might be seen all the time. But in a way where they are taken for granted. Some photos I think quite fondly of are just shots of streets where I grew up. Not the best, but they really captured it exactly how it was at the time and I’m thankful I took them. Given that digital photography is essentially free I think people should take more photos. D: I agree. I started taking photos when I was just walking around navigating Sydney. I kept doing that when I moved to Brisbane and now anyone who’s seen my Instagram story will see anything that interests me at all, you know like sunset, a flower that's an interesting colour, just anything that catches my eye. I like taking photos of interesting signs that are cracking and fading or have interesting characters, or even just for the composition. I think it’s important to take photos of anything that interests you.. Sticker and imposter - photo source unknown (202?) Q: Cannot agree more with you here. I notice you found an incredibly niche interest that I had completely overlooked - glass repairer stickers in windows. Can you talk about how you even came to notice that? D: Well it actually first came from Sydney, I don’t know if anyone would be familiar with the Kewl Fibro glass repair stickers. Those writers have done a lot of really interesting outside the box stuff in Sydney. They made stickers that were replicas of the glass repair ones. So that anyone walking by would just think it’s a glass repair sticker but anyone who pays attention would recognise them. At first I just noticed that and didn’t care for any of the actual glass repair company stickers but in time I came to really appreciate the simple graphic design, all the poppy colours, being in your face trying to get your attention but at the same time having to sit in the corner of the window. All the interesting variations and funny names they have like Ace Glass, Oz Glazing.. it’s a funny little world that’s everywhere and most people don’t even notice it. Q: I think the thing that really struck me when I looked into it is how incredibly authentic it is, they’re not doing it for an artistic point of view - it’s literally their business. I don’t know if a source book or a catalogue of them exists but I’d love to see one. What direction do you hope to take your art in the future? D: Long term would be to do art full time in some way, be that painting or painting as well as photography - something creative. Just to be doing things that I want to do full time, short term I’d like to do a solo show which I think is achievable. I would like to sell more work, but not because I need to - just to help me reach my end goal to make more art. I want to paint a lot, and just see what I end up doing, to see if I’m painting the same in a year - or if I'm not even painting. Making clothes, shooting photos. I don’t know what I’ll be doing two, three, ten twenty years from now. I’m just trusting the process, seeing when I end up and having fun with it. Q: Any shout outs? D: Shout out to all the people doing their thing. Q: Dan, thank you for your time. Studio work - photo via Dan Hewitt (2023) Groundfloor show, Sydney - photo via Dan Hewitt (2023)