The Space Cowboy is a multidisciplinary artist from Byron Bay, Australia. A natural performer, he started presenting his unique skills at local markets at the age of eight and has since shocked and amazed audiences worldwide. His numerous television appearances, including ‘Officially Amazing’, ‘Outrageous Acts Of Science’ and AGT, have solidified his fame as a Sideshow Celebrity.
One of the most innovative sword swallowers alive today, The Space Cowboy, performs an ever-expanding list of daring sideshow stunts. Currently, he holds 55 Guinness World Records, the most held by an Australian. As he follows in the footsteps of legends such as Houdini, his death-defying displays are history in the making.
Recently exploding into the visual arts scene, his unique work has sold to collectors worldwide.
“I paint with bold emotion and a high-speed wet overloaded brush style, using gravity to create the image. My art presents a monochrome duality to express a balance between life and living and death and dying with a daring glint.”
Electrifying colours vibrate off the canvas, infused with undeniably vibrant energy. This is the work of The Space Cowboy. Bold gestural brushstrokes and splashes of acrylic paint met with sharp angular lines, the glaze of oil sticks and diffused fields of spray paints. Also, using his hand as his brush, he uses these mediums to synthesise the figurative and abstract into one. Imbued with a sense of motion, his intense, fast applications of paint channel his expressive nature as a performer. The dynamism of his work extends beyond the canvas. Displaced into new surreal environments, we witness The Space Cowboy manipulating form and colour, blurring the lines between every day and the absurd.
Dark humour saturates his contemporary plays on classic mythologies, famed fairytales accented with eye-catching allusions to popular culture, explorations of anatomy and the foundations of life, and even works bordering on the autobiographical referencing his own experiences as a performer. In this signature styling, we see many subjects emerge before us.
There is something primordial, elemental, speaking to each of us as these aesthetically exhilarating images illuminate the unseen connection between us all. They transform into visual metaphors for the greater universal lessons of our world, encouraging us to look deeper into ourselves.
