My name is Regan Dometha and I'm a Melbourne based painter.
So for me, deciding what to create can be a bit of a challenge, not because I'm not
sure what to create, it's more so because I always have too many ideas.
So for me it's about an editing process.
I have to narrow down what I think will be the most successful ideas and then develop
those or build those into images.
I'm much more of a builder than a planner, if that makes sense.
I've always been much more interested in words than images, it's like I'm very inspired
by images but I find that words are a good starting point.
So for example I'll start with a word and then a list and that'll become a sentence
and a paragraph and an idea etc and that kind of gets the whole ball rolling.
My folio has probably filled more so with lists and notes and actual sketches I tend
to do a lot of the sketching while I'm working on a piece or I'll already have a sketch and
then I'll kind of work that into a painting and then manipulate it and change it anyway
so everything's kind of done as I go.
So the inspiration for the work changes, it depends on where I'm at and what I'm doing
and what the show is.
I mean I've always been interested in painting and probably around 2004-2005 I did a series
of work or an exhibition called Contemporary Leftovers and I kind of arrived at that with
this whole idea of looking at art history much like a family tree.
It just kept expanding and expanding and then thinking where we're at now and almost looking
at that as a consolidation of art history.
So I arrived at the point of the Leftovers of Art History and Contemporary Art and came
to Contemporary Leftovers.
At the time I had a really big studio like a three or four car garage studio and I would
have a lot of canvases along the walls and then I'd have canvas on the floor as well
which was fantastic because a canvas on the floor would pick up the marks as you're moving
around from canvas to canvas, pick up the drips, you're wiping the brushes, you get footprints
and things like that and in some ways those marks on the floor became just as interesting
as the works that I was completing or trying to create so I started incorporating the canvas
from the floor into the works on the wall and then I started cutting them up and going
back and forth so it really opened up a new pathway for how I was creating my work and
I kind of called that Contemporary Leftovers.
The new exhibition Dancing with Death is actually the first in a series of exhibitions that
will explore influences and inspiration from Mexico and South America.
This first one is also I guess influenced by my recent marriage to my wife Emily and
the birth of our first daughter Ruby.
So there's a lot of different themes in the work for me I guess Dancing with Death is
about sort of looking at death as change so I mean we're both in our 30s now and obviously
we had a great time during our 20s hence the extended party time and then you know waiting
until our early 30s to have a child so there's sort of reflecting upon change moving into
the next chapter of your life and using I guess death as a metaphor for that so it's
not necessarily a negative thing much like with Day of the Dead it's something should
be celebrated and embraced.
