More powerful than a spray-can. Graffiti writers have long used fire extinguishers filled with paint to spray paint often used to write a very large tag high on a wall. But one Melbourne artist has made the paint filled fire extinguisher his own – Ash Keating.
Fire-extinguishers filled with paint have long been part of a graffiti tradition of improvisation. Using fire-extinguishers to spray paint peaked in Melbourne in 2012.
Ash Keating has been painting massive walls (long before other Melbourne-based street artists got into the mural business) as performances. Painting massive surfaces of concrete walls with a controlled chaos of colour. Action painting at an industrial scale, without an aisle, without drawings. It is also painting with the hand of the artist mixed in with chance. Earlier this year he painted a painted a warehouse of concrete pumping company on the edge of the city A Love Letter to a Very Rocky Creek (Hume Response). (For more on the Hume Response.)
I visited his studio on Saturday afternoon on the 20 July, it was more of a pop-up weekend gallery than an open studio. The Hume Response Paintings are in the same primary colours as A Love Letter to a Very Rocky Creek (Hume Response). The “domestically scaled canvases” are for the domestic market and “invert the whole project” as Keating described it.
Keating has recently moved studios. Ironic, given the surfaces that he paints, Keating’s studio is a brand new tilt-slab warehouse in Bakers Business Park in North Coburg. An added irony is that the only fire-extinguisher in the room is brand new and not full of paint. The pristine beauty of the grey concrete slabs without any drips, layers of paint splatters, misty layers of a thin paint or thick chunky lumps of paint (something that you don’t get with spray-cans) hung with a few paintings.
Black Mark 