Sunday, June 25, 2006

nu stuff

a long awaited upgrade has just occurred on www.andrewkillick.com

there is now a third page to the gallery, featuring some of my more recent work - click on the photo in my hands on the home page to access the gallery, and then click 'page 3'...

also, you can now buy an eBook version of my poetry book 'epilogue' (given that there are virtually no paper book copies left). that costs US$4 on paypal, and you get to that bit on the website by clicking on the cover of the book on the home page of the website.

sweet.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

little world

i'm currently in the process of reading an excellent book called 'the christian imagination' edited by leland ryken (sounds a bit boring i know - but truly isn't). i'm always on the look-out for quotes etc that help define what i mean by my 'safe little world' concept and how that can be realised through art.

in an essay by gene edward veith jr called 'reading and writing worldviews' included in 'the christian imagination', i found this quote:

"The very act of writing involves the articulation of meanings - drawn from the author's beliefs, assumptions, and imaginative constructions - that constitute a little world, which readers, by letting the language play in their own minds as they read, can access in their own terms."

on the headphones: 'we r the omc' by omc, from the album 'in the neighbourhood' (various).

Saturday, May 20, 2006

great music question survey results!

well now, i had a great response to the music question. this was the question: "if you had to choose the musical works of just one artist/band/composer and forego all others, who would it be?"

and now for the results...

1st=: Bach, the Beatles, and U2.
2nd: Miles Davis

the really interesting part is that other than those four artists/bands/composers no other nomination received more than one vote. the other nominations (in no particular order) were:

pink floyd
massive attack
linkin park
mike post
steven curtis chapman
the vineyard worship team
king david
crowded house
sarah mcloughlin
tom waits
bob marley
third eye blind
tangerine dream
radiohead
colm
vivaldi
bob dylan
don mcglashan
bic runga

it has to be pointed out that some people cheated a little bit and said more than one (i've included those as well). but in general, answers were pretty clear.

what i plan to do now is a weekly article on each of the nominated artists - so stay posted. feel free to leave comments below.

on the headphones: 'let's talk' by coldplay, from the album 'x & y'. www.coldplay.com

Saturday, May 06, 2006

artisan

i read a couple of the print editions of the artisan journal this week. very cool. artisan is christian arts/media organisation in the uk with networking into ny and la.

having been impressed with how cool their journal is (read the copies cover to cover) i visited their website which turns out to be a great resource.

anyway, as an offshoot of that, i found this quote in an article on their website by makoto fujimura, artist and founder of IAM:

"In art we create and imagine our belongingness. We are, in this sense, creating a home for our imaginations to inhabit. What kind of a home is it? Is it inviting? Is it haunted? Is it a loft in a city or a farmhouse? Or is it a home far away, a home that we can only long for?"

i love this quote, and think it is spot-on for me and my 'safe little world' concept, which celebrates the safety of an imaginery/real world, (sub)urban homes (or homes set up against the wilderness) but also questions the safety of it. so there we are.

on the headphones: 'j connais mon role' by mc solaar, from the album 'mach 6'. www.solaarsystem.net

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

noise


i went to the noise conference last weekend. 1500 christian musos got together for two days of teaching, music and electives. while i'm not primarily a muso, i get a creative buzz out of going to the conference (this was my second time) and my official excuse is that i play hand percussion and do some bv's for church music.

noise featured a few quite big names in christian music. nz's own brooke fraser (pictured - not a photo i took, by the way), phil joel of the newsboys, hillsong united from australia, and speaker phil baker amongst a lot of others. in the event, all these people i've just listed were highlights - brooke fraser for her sheer talent combined with genuine commitment to God, phil joel for being a down-to-earth and onto it talented new zealander, hillsong united for delivering the most full-on praise and worship music ever, and phil baker for being an incredibly good speaker, with clear insights and brilliant humour.

once again the noise conference delivered, and i'll almost certainly be there next year. i had a little run-in with the gravel carpark outside the venue (sprinting + gravel = sore knee + torn jeans) but nevermind - maybe i got a little over excited.

you can see parachute music's official photos of the event (including the one above) here.

on the headphones: 'no roots' by faithless, from the album 'no roots'. www.faithless.co.uk

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

my computer

i got this picture by email today. what incredible foresight these scientists showed in 1954. it looks exactly like the computer i had in 2004 (see caption, click the image to see it full-size)...

on the headphones: 'the sicilian' by bonobo, from the album 'one offs ... remixes and b-sides'. www.bonobomusic.com

Friday, April 21, 2006

stuff all crammed together

hello. after another hiatus in posting, i have again accumulated probably more info than you'd normally squeeze into one post.

pt 1: we've just had the easter jazz festival here in tauranga. my father came down and we caught a couple of great concerts. firstly, the nathan haines show, and then a tribute to miles davis with some of the best jazz musicians in nz. some brilliant virtuoso playing all round.

pt 2: my mate malcolm dunn is working on an ep under name 'colm', and you can check out the post-rock niceness at his myspace site.

pt 3: i've completed my art project - a6 cards of my work, printed and cropped and then arranged into a montage with fotoclips that now hangs in our lounge. the cards are starting to curl and i don't suppose that will stop - i really needed to add more clips, but for now i am telling myself that the slight curling is part of the appeal of the medium. i've taken a somewhat nasty picture of the montage with my cheapo digital camera and you can see it by clicking here.

pt 4: don't forget that if you're so inclined you can subscribe to this blog over there on the righthand column, and get newsfeeds as i post new stuff.

pt 5: i'll be putting two new book reviews and maybe a film review on intraspace very soon.

pt 6: the film 'noi the albino' is great.

pt 7: next week i'm off to the noise conference in auckland. last year this was brilliant - a two-day conference for musicians with a little thrown in for creatives in general. inspirational and exciting, it's the main thing i've been looking forward to so far this year. stand by for a report on that in a couple of weeks.

on the headphones: 'could you be loved?' by bob marley, from the album 'legend'.

Saturday, April 01, 2006

projects, concerts and innovations

another long delay between posts. so what's new?

well, for a start you can now subscribe to a news feed from this blog - meaning that whenever i update you will get the new content sent to you. you can subscribe to this (free) by clicking here or on the link to the right. i also have a subscription service for my reviews blog, intraspace. subscribe to that one here or by visiting intraspace.

speaking of intraspace, there is a new review on there - a review of the book 'bono on bono'. well worth checking out.

in my creative world, i am working on a project to help me better visualise my aesthetic approach, and to see some of my artwork functioning away from the computer screen (ie on the wall). at the moment i am using quite a few different visual styles. there is a common thread in that they tend towards 'pop art' but in some cases they are in very different areas stylisitically. so, i'm in the process of turning some of the pieces (including some of my photography) into A6 pictures (partly also in preparation for my postcard project) printed on card. once i have a few of these printed out, i'm going to crop them and then put them together with photo clips to create a montage which will then hang on our lounge wall. i've always seen my visual work in terms of groups of images displayed close together, so apart from this being a learning experience it will also help me realise that aim. the process has already helped to stimulate my creativity and last weekend i made four brandnew pieces as well as polishing some existing ones. the finished montage will evolve and grow as i create and print out new pieces. i'll post a pic of the montage when it is ready to go.

in other news, rob and i went to the bic runga concert at tauranga's holy trinity church. the whole thing was brilliant. she played a lot of her new material which is very atmospheric. her band included neil finn, shayne carter (dimmer) and anika moa plus the guitarist from pluto (tim arnold). they were supported by flight of the concordes, a brilliantly funny musical duo (sold out concerts at the edinburgh fringe festival etc). i don't normally go in for joke music but these guys are great. if you get the chance to see bic or flight of the concordes then get to it.

on the headphones: 'lsd partie' by roland vincent, from the 'ocean's twelve' soundtrack.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

interview! innovations!

well now, the next time you visit my website, you will see (especially if you use mozilla firefox) a tiny little picture of me in the address bar of your browser (known as a 'favicon')! tremendous!

also if you save my website in your 'favourites' list, that little picture will appear in your favourites menu beside my website name. wow! if you want to know how to do this on your own website, go here (i used a little program called 'iconomaker' rather than their online ico maker).

AND, as if that wasn't exciting enough by itself, here's an added bonus for you. below is a link to an mp3 audio file of an interview of me by rob holding, originally broadcast on radio rhema before christmas.

you can either left click the link below and listen to the interview in your browser window, or if you right click and do 'save as...' you can download the interview so that you can listen to it again and again at your leisure. either way, the file is about 1.2 meg so is rather easy to download.

interview of andrew here

on the headphones: the interview of course...

music video and artwork

the music video that i worked on the creative team for is now streaming at amplifier.co.nz.

click here to have a geeze. (don't look at me with regard to that 'parental advisory'...)

also, i'm thrilled by this - visit digirama (nz's current equivalent to itunes) and see some artwork i did for jamie - i did the artist pic and album cover (see below the track list)...

free photography books

it is well worth doing a post dedicated to this link...

at www.democraticbooks.org you can download free photography books. they are pdf files which you can download and then print out and make into a book. so far they have 14 books featuring the work of different photographers. very cool.

i found the link through www.lensculture.com which is my all-time favourite photography website (see the links page of my website).

on the headphones: 'prosperous' by gROUSE. download it free here.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

depressing reading, exciting listening

sorry for my silence, oh you my faithful reader(s).

look, i just read this:

"The number of online weblogs has reached an estimated 27 million, a new report has found. According to blog search and indexing site Technocrati, around 75,000 new blogs are created every day. US-based Technocrati said it tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour." here

i'm just so thankful to have my slice of that enormous pie - isn't it great? (depressing?)

well, to aleviate our collective depression at being tiny numbers in a very large and exponentially growing equation, go and visit the jamie strange page in the music section of download.com. there are three tracks to download there - two are happy and one is more pensive. jamie, as i've mentioned before, is a mate of mine making catchy pop rock and aiming for world domination (we are soon to start work on some tv commercials for him).

on the headphones: 'hymn of the big wheel' by massive attack, from the album 'blue lines'. www.massiveattack.co.uk

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

some changes a-coming

i've got a few new ideas for my website coming up.

i'm planning to add a 'favicon' to the site so that when you visit or save my website in a favourites list it'll have a nifty little icon beside the address. excitement!

the program i'll be using to create the favicon is iconomaker 3.0, which has just been released by icon empire. it's a cool little program that lets you do all kinds of effects to create real nice windows icons. it occurs to me that icon creation might have potential as a full-blown art project - tiny little pictures that you click on reveal something else...

anyway, check out iconomaker by visiting www.iconempire.com

also coming up on my website is a new postcard project which will involve quite a bit of design work on the site - but more on that later!

on the headphones: '8:45 PM on a rainy friday' by christophe e. download it for free here

gig booked

i've been booked in for a poetry performance at the courtyard gallery in parnell, auckland, at the end of may. this is for the opening of my brother's photography exhibition...

so put that down in your diaries...

on the headphones: 'in a state' by unkle, from the album 'never, never, land'. www.unkle.com

group poem

as promised, here is a group poem that joy, anna and i did the other night - a nice process where you write two lines each and then fold the paper over so the next person can only see your second line. you end up with some pretty cool juxtapositions...

Poem 240106.1 (joy, anna and andrew)

Beautiful, big, round eyes
but it’s what’s in them that makes them so
vulnerable to words that we said when we were less wise
and before time taught us to guard our thoughts
and mind our tongues
and partake of soap mouth wash.
Maybe you could even try
Just being nice to her, having a decent conversation?
making synapses spark and flicker
electrical pulses that carry signals full of meaning
discarded and disregarded then slowly taken up again
as the realisation grows that they are essential to
his survival, as essential as his
need to breathe.
The air seems clearer somehow at this altitude
and we can see for mile as we circle
what once was prey
but now is our salvation.
Now we will be redeemed
now we can look each other in the eye and say what we
really mean
what you really mean to me
and what it means to be alive and real
to grow and feel
to shed sorrow
and heal.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

a poem published

i've been a bit silent on this blog for a couple of weeks - but there is some new stuff on my other blog so check that out.

i'm back at work now, but have managed to find a little bit of time to work on some art stuff - doing some graphical art with some of my photo images. also joy, anna and i wrote some collaborative poems last night by writing two lines each, then folding the page so that the next person could only see the second line, and so on, until the page is full. we got some quite cool results - i will post one soon.


meanwhile, i had a poem published for the first time in quite a while last week. my poem 'spirits bay' was published in 'cs news' the bimonthly magazine of the chrysalis seed trust. chrysalis seed are based in christchurch (nz) and promote christian arts. they take a serious and high quality approach, holding mainstream exhibitions and distributing their magazine in galleries around new zealand. they do great work.

to download a pdf copy of cs news (this i recommend) go here and also check out their website.

Saturday, December 31, 2005

happy new year

christmas is over, new year's eve today. anna and i had a pretty good time at christmas.

rob and i went on a quick photoshoot on christmas evening. i took my lomo and pentax and we drove along the coast near my parents' place - a fairly wilderness place on the firth of thames. the area is renowned for birdwatching, so i wanted to take some photos of the 'hides' that birdwatchers use to watch birds from. they are shacks with slit windows that you can stick your camera / binoculars through.

the day was overcast so i should get some nice somber shots. i experimented with using fill-in flash, which will theoretically render the shacks in stark relief agains a dark grey.

in the process, i finished two rolls of film that have been in my camera for a fair while. i always love developing that kind of film because there are always images you have forgotten.

hope to have some images online soon.

on the headphones: 'sunshine (feat. jess chambers)' by rhian sheehan, from the album 'tiny blue biosphere'. www.rhiansheehan.com

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

merry christmas

not too much happening in the art / text world of andrew killick. i'm happy with the way 'epilogue' has gone - i have just a few copies left.

in a couple of weeks i'm going to add a new 'free stuff' section to my website where i will include an mp3 download of an interview i did on rhema.

there is quite a bit of new material on intraspace - my book review blog: including a review of c.s. lewis's sci-fi book 'that hideous strength' (see, even i have tie-ins to the narnia movie).

i'm looking forward to christmas - have some down time, anna and i will visit my folks and i'm planning to take all my cameras with me. hopefully that will result in macro, double-exposure, underwater, vignetted visual madness.

so, merry christmas. have a good one.

on the headphones: what the heck is this? some kind of french folk music.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

nuver blog

that's right kids, i now have another blog. i've called it 'intraspace' and it's somewhere for me to review books, films and music.

not only that but happy punters can buy the stuff i review direct from the blog through a link to amazon! tremendous.

first up is a review of the classic miles davis autobiography...

go there by clicking on the link to the right, or on the word intraspace.

Friday, December 02, 2005

dvd design...

this is a package i did some artwork for. the whole thing was completed this week. it's a dvd/cd set promoting the first single of my mate jamie strange (songwriter).

the dvd contains a music video of the single ('i wonder') shot by roly ebbing and lisa beedham (credits include the rhian sheehan video 'sunshine'). for the video itself, i worked on the concept and then as general dog's body at the shoot.

for the final package, i designed the cover, cd/dvd faces, and dvd menus utilising the target and outline elements designed by renee blair. i also designed the jamie strange logo and the dvd includes some stills photography i did during the video shoot.

so there you go. contact me if you want to get your hands on this dvd plus five track cd package. all for NZ$15.

on the stereo: 'the will to live' by ben harper, from the album 'the will to live'. www.benharper.net