Reg_Mombassa

REG MOMBASSA ESSAY After the initial paragraph(s) of his biography….. Mombassa’s artwork is of two distinctive styles. The type of artwork he designs for Mambo – almost cartoonish and in vivid colours, incorporating religious, political and popular culture themes – is probably the one for which he is most widely known for. However, his landscapes and portraits are equally sought by collectors all around the world. Mombassa’s earlier artwork revolved around solitary houses of the style that his father had built; simple fibro homes bleached white in the sun. This theme was again revisited, suggesting a sense of nostalgia. For example, ‘Ancestral Shrine’, according to Mombassa, refers to the spiritual significance that certain houses or locations can assume in a person’s memory or dreams. But on the other hand, no ordinary life is really that ordinary, and Mombassa’s wilder imaginings are really just an exploration of what lies behind the cladding of our weatherboard hearts; the darker, stranger impulses that shape us. He wants to set us free from society’s restrictions, all the while honouring the basic goods of life: parents, children, a home, a backyard to play in. Mombassa also painted miniatures in acrylic paint on little pieces of Masonite. “I like painting miniatures” said Mombassa, “because you can finish a picture relatively quickly and it is also a reaction against the modern tendency towards very large paintings. The implication being that “unless it’s enormous, it’s not very good.” Mombassa seduced a younger generation with his graphic work for the fashion label Mambo. Mambo’s aim was to produce clothing at a premium price, that helped Australians laugh at themselves. Mombassa took the mickey out of the Australian Coat of Arms by having a kangaroo and an emu sip from a can of “Mambo bitter”. Across Australia, young professionals started wearing shorts and t-shirts bearing images of farting dogs and suburban streets lined with telegraph poles. Mombassa wondered if the art had become too commercial as young people started to feel annoyed that all our overweight fathers and uncles were wearing Mambo shirts to barbecues and it was becoming less appealing to them. Mombassa started painting his ‘Australian Jesus’ character in the mid-90’s and has used him as a vehicle for political messages e.g. ‘Jesus’ has been shown welcoming boat people with an olive branch, taking solar-powered showers and keeping ‘sustainable furniture’. Australian Jesus is Mombassa’s attempt to find the sacred within the profane, the divine in the ordinary. This is typified by Mombassa’s “Australian Jesus at the Football”, in which the local Messiah produced the “miracle of pies and beer” distributed to 40,000 hungry hordes at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Lauded as a pop culture artist, Mombassa has become one of Australia’s most recognisable visual artists in helping establish the fame and fortune of the Mambo surfwear brand. He incorporates religious, political and popular culture themes into his quirky, semi-surreal landscapes, with comic-book colouration and a bizarre range of fictional characters. Tending not to take life too seriously, Mombassa has stated that “many professional artists are too dazzled by the pompous high seriousness and tedious theory of the art world”.