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Artist Aidan Jarvis is influenced by whatever goes into his head and stays there – and boy is it a mixed bag.

 

If I had to paint a picture of what’s going on inside Aidan Jarvis’ head, I’d start with the backing music. For that, we need a stereo, preferably an AKAI MX-950, complete with floor speakers. They also have faces – the speakers that is – and when they open their mouths to yawn, Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies pours into the space. Mike Muir’s voice recites an anthem, rich in the ethos of 1980s punk culture, while the drums quicken along with Aidan’s pulse.

The walls are lined with band posters by Ray Ahn and Ben Brown, skateboards soar through a mosh pit and an overflowing collection of Mambo clothes break free of their wardrobe to hop, skip and jump in time with the music. Faceless. Fierce.

In the far corner there’s a TV playing RAGE, an abandoned bass guitar propped against it, and rolls of crisp white paper come tumbling into the room – hundreds of metres of paper decorated in the five-minute sketches born from Aidan’s left hand… or his right, since he’s semi ambidextrous.

Then there’s a tree, with rainbow serpents wrapped around its branches and apples that, on closer inspection, are small red skulls. Apple skulls, if you will. Above it all, in the highest of branches, sits Peter Pan wearing a Massappeal t-shirt, overlooking the scene below with a bundt cake in his hands.

Music = inspiration

Coffs Harbour artist Aidan Jarvis is fuelled by music. He needs it daily to create – as long as he can find the right playlist.

“That’s what drives me to draw, the right music in my ears – if I don’t listen to music, the inspiration basically disappears,” he says. “You want to hear my playlists? Okay, I’ll share them with you, but go easy – there are a few bands in there that might be a bit of a challenge to listen to from start to finish.”

Challenge accepted.

Siri, play Massappeal.

One minute and 32 seconds later.

Siri, stop.

So it’s not for everyone. But the point is, the mixed bag of punk, rockabilly and blues that combine to create Aidan’s go-to playlists serves him daily. He needs noise. Loud noise. Whether he’s designing album covers, promo posters or merch, it’s often a single lyric or even the song title that feeds into everything on the page.

“Once I’ve found the playlist that gels, I’m away,” he says. “And that usually looks like me with headphones on, pencil to paper, sketching. If I’m creating a piece for a business or muso, I throw down some keywords from our chats and just let the pencil take me from there. I’ll jump onto the iPad to clean up my chosen concepts in Illustrator and send them through. There’s no bad idea, that’s what I’ve learnt. Sometimes you might think the first piece is your best, but it’s the last one your client falls in love with. At the end of the day I work to deliver their vision, or as close as I can possibly get to it.”

It’s a free-flowing but consistent approach that Aidan has honed over time. Because he wasn’t always this way. In fact, once upon a time in Japan, he put the pencil down for close to eight years – something that’s hard to imagine when boyhood Aidan was nearly always creating, designing, drawing. And he was good at it, unlike skateboarding.

“I loved skateboarding but I sucked at it. But that’s fine, it was more about the culture that came with it for me. I was there for the music, it spoke to me and it felt good at the time.”

The time being 80s-90s Australia, first in Sydney’s Shire before heading north in his teen years. It was there Aidan met a guy whose living room was filled with more records than he could count – there was punk, rock and independent Australian artists just bursting from the walls.

“The Hard-Ons, Beasts of Bourbon and Massappeal, they were just some of the artists that triggered core influences I hold onto today – they’re the soundtrack to my youth, alongside RAGE, of course,” says Aidan. “But despite my growing obsession with the culture and the revelation that you could actually design band posters and get paid for it, when I left school I went into cheffing.”

It’s true, a bit of a curveball but there you have it. Aidan scored himself an apprenticeship at South West Rocks, but truth be told he only lasted 12 months. He describes the short-lived experience as a love/hate relationship that ultimately nudged him back into the direction of art.

That time he stopped drawing

Enter Seaforth TAFE and SIT Enmore Design Centre – where Aidan spent four years of his life studying a mix of fine art and graphic design. While the first gave him free rein, the latter led to him learning how to deliver on a brief.

“I had to figure out how to apply my style and approach to more rigid design briefs, which wasn’t easy at first,” says Aidan. “I realised I was training to become more of a tool for a client, to deliver on what they’re thinking, with my influence threaded through. By the time I graduated, the desktop publishing boom had hit, which meant everyone had Adobe software and full-time gigs in the industry were scarce. So I went freelance and dipped back into my hospitality training on the side.”

From American food labels to band posters, menu designs and dental brochures, Aidan turned his design hand to just about anything that crossed his desk. But by 2002 he needed a circuit breaker. He’d recently met his now wife, Keiko, and they made the bold decision to take a working holiday in Japan. Aidan would get work in a restaurant there, despite not speaking a word of Japanese, and they’d return eight years later, refreshed and ready for whatever came next.

Except, in that time, Aidan didn’t draw once.

“It was rad. I needed to step away from what I knew, go somewhere I’d never been before and experience something completely different,” he says.

“And while I wasn’t drawing or seeking out art, it’s hard not to be influenced by design in Japan – you’re surrounded by it. Everything from the packaging to the posters, the ads and the magazines, funky little characters appear everywhere you turn and then there’s the sculptures on the street. Even the smallest of things seems extra over there, like you see a noodle packet and get excited because the design elements are incredible.”

His eyes are alight as he goes on to describe the festivals and different cultural events throughout the year. There’s Setsubun, where beans are thrown around the house to get the monsters out, and the Momotarō masks in every supermarket. Everything, everywhere seems to leap out of the street as a living, breathing character. Even if he didn’t realise it at the time, Aidan was absorbing it all on a daily basis.

“It’s true. I didn’t realise it, but it must have been seeping in because I can see how it’s influenced the work I create here in Coffs Harbour today – when I finally started drawing again.”

And that took a while. In fact, it wasn’t until late 2016 when Aidan watched a documentary on lowbrow art that he picked up a pencil again. The program was all hot rods, music and interviews with famous lowbrow artists sprinkled in for good measure. The genre spoke to him in a way he hadn’t experienced since he came face-to-face with punk culture back in his teens.

Next, came the Lowbrow Art Academy.

“His name was Jesper Bram and he was a tattooist in Europe. I started following him after he appeared in the documentary and one day he put out this video that caught my eye,” says Aidan. “He was starting up the Lowbrow Art Academy. It was designed to get people back into doing what they loved after taking a break, or helping people to upskill. He was well-connected and invited a whole range of artists to come and talk to a group of us who joined the Academy, sharing their style and approach.

“Then he introduced the five-minute drawing challenge – and that was a game changer for me.”

It is what it says on the tin: an invitation for artists to draw for five minutes a day, every day. The end result was irrelevant. It was about showing up, being consistent and it ultimately snapped Aidan out of his drawing drought.

“It got me to a point where if I wasn’t drawing every day it didn’t feel right, like if you’re a gym junkie and you skip leg day I guess, it just felt off. It helped me to develop good drawing habits and looking back over the body of work I created, I now have around 1300 drawings. It’s a mixed bag of terrible to horrible, but it’s amazing reference material and helps me get from A-Z much faster,” he says.

“The biggest lesson I learnt in the middle of it all was that it doesn’t have to be perfect – because that held me up a lot, the thought that it wasn’t good enough. That’s the kind of thinking that will stop you before you even begin. Once you get over that hurdle, everything changes.”

Ausmusic Drawing Challenge

Since leaping over that massive creativity blocker, Aidan has teamed up with some incredible local businesses to design t-shirts, posters, murals and the holy grail of the design world, beer cans. But it also showed him he had far more fuel in the tank than he ever imagined, enough to launch his own annual drawing challenge for something near and dear to his heart – independent Australian music.

The idea was born in COVID, when stage doors closed and musicians were in dire need of support. So Aidan asked himself the question: what can I do?

“I can draw. So I started the Ausmusic Drawing Challenge to coincide with Ausmusic Month,” he says. “I knocked out a list of 30 Australian bands, including a couple of big ones, but mostly minors, and invited other artists to join me in designing their album covers and post them on Instagram daily to help spread the word. My hope is that, off the back of seeing our work, someone buys a ticket to one of their gigs, grabs a t-shirt while they’re there and maybe even discovers their new favourite band.”

Now in its fourth year, the Ausmusic Drawing Challenge continues to spread the word about how great Australian music is. Artists from around the country join forces to lift up the unheard, put new music in people’s ears and celebrate up-and-coming talent. It’s another way Aidan ensures he stays consistent with his drawing practice, continues adding fuel to the design fire and discovers new music while he’s at it. And now that he’s in the zone, he can’t ever imagine going back to a time when he doesn’t have a pencil in his hand.

“Why do people stop drawing? Why do we stop doing any of the things that made us happy when we were kids? I’m guilty of that. But the Lowbrow Art Academy was the catalyst for me to get back into it. None of us were kids in that group, we were all people actively choosing to revisit a passion we’d lost as adulting started creeping in.

“I’m now at a place where I’m proud of what I do. I pull my influences from whatever goes into my head and stays there – whether that’s music or cars, band posters or a random Japanese character I passed on the street one day. It’s fun and bold, a connection to imperfection, it’s about experimentation and remembering not to let go of that as you grow older. We all get corporate serious and my art practice helps me to avoid that, along with listening to good music of course. It all comes back to a great playlist.

“One day, when I’ve lost my marbles, someone’s going to pull out a late 80s punk record, put a pencil in my hand, and I’ll come back round.”

Like what you see and want to jump inside Aidan’s rollercoaster of a mind? We get it. You can find him at the links below.

Website | Instagram| Photography Jay Black

GERAGERA

Did you know Aidan and his wife Keiko also own and operate the GERAGERA Espresso Van? You’ll find them serving up great coffee and homemade treats to folks throughout Coffs Harbour daily. No prepackaged vibes here, everything on the shelf is homemade. And while it helps Aidan stay connected to his hospitality side, he’s shifted from the grill to sweets.

“Keiko does all the savoury and she’s amazing at it – she’s put a Japanese twist on our sandwiches and they’ve been really popular. As for me, I’m on baking. I’ve got a thing about bundt cakes at the moment, when citrus is in season I can’t go past them. Do I listen to music while I’m cooking? It depends. If I’m whipping up a cake I might throw something on, but not when I’m grilling a steak or browning off some onions back at home. Sautéing is a sensory experience and you need to listen to what you’re cooking. That’s music in itself.”

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Steph Wanless

Editorial Director. Grammar-obsessed, Kate Bush impressionist, fuelled by black coffee, British comedy and the fine art of the messy bun.