House of Meggs
Many moons ago, long before the existence of Hosier Lane and Melbourne’s other legal graffiti walls, a group of artist outlaws known as the Everfresh crew would gather under the cover of darkness to leave their creative mark on the sleeping world. No wall or abandoned building was safe from their genius flair for spraying paint from cans, flying their art like a pirate flag. Yet this was no ordinary band of taggers or amateurs, and before long the general population started to take notice of their skills and talent, with many of the Everfresh crew going on to have serious art careers. How good is that!! David Hooke, AKA Meggs, is one such talented human and over the years we’ve watched his style evolve from monster and superhero smashups to murals of overwhelming size, which combine splashes of colour and frenetic energy, while touches of nature peek through the visual hurricane. It’s just rad really, but let’s meet the man behind the paint …
Please tell us a bit about yourself – when did you first start painting and what started you on that journey?
I have a background in graphic design and worked as a designer during my 20’s until it started to feel repetitive, and my attention was further drawn to more ‘outside’ pursuits. Around 2003 I adopted the nickname MEGGS (from the comic strip Ginger Meggs) and started on a journey of making street art after hours. In those earlier years it was all for the fun, challenge and social life, which led me to connect with a bunch of other street/ stencil artists and becoming a part of the ‘Everfresh Studio’. Everfresh was an unofficial collective of guys (Phibs, Sync, Rone, Reka, Makatron, Tooth, Prism, Wanderlust and myself) who started a warehouse studio in Collingwood and produced (collectively and individually) a really large amount of street art around Melbourne from like 2003 to 2010. These were really my formative years becoming an actual artist and learning on the fly painting and producing stickers, stencils, paste ups, graffiti and murals. This period led me to leave the security of a job and pursue art full time, enjoying the ride and embracing the opportunities to grow and learn that came with it.
Who or what would you say have been your biggest influences or inspirations – both art-wise and personally?
My first passion during high school was skateboarding, so one of my first art influences was legendary illustrator Jim Phillips as well as the broad range of graphics and artworks that was being championed by the skate and surf industry in the 1990’s. It was really my childhood love of cartoons like He-Man and Transformers plus skate magazines in my adolescence that sent me on the path of being a visual creative. My early art influences would be a real long list mix of fine art and pop culture art, including Futura 2000, Jack Kirby, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Conor Harrington (just to name a few). Overall, I was just really attracted to the colour, movement and chaos of the surf/ skate/ punk/ graffiti subcultures and the way these were visually translated in bold and dynamic visuals, which seemed to break a lot of the conventional art rules.
You have a pretty distinctive style – can you tell us how your work has evolved over time? Has the way you work and the tools you use changed as well?
Firstly thanks, I appreciate that 🙂 My work has really evolved over time, and looking back, it’s representative of certain chapters in my life and experiences/ changes I was going through personally. My start in street art/ graffiti was very graphic, very bold and illustrative, and incorporated a lot of my early skate and comic influences combined with a distressed and expressive style that felt most natural for me to paint. I really had two channels of work going on, my cleaner, spray can based drawn character work and then my studio work, which was more a distressed and deconstructed mash up of pop culture influences. As I’ve grown as a person and artist I’ve been able to develop more original and personal messaging and imagery into my work and shed the earlier ‘pop-culture’ content while keeping and refining the expressive way I paint. My tools have changed and grown from no longer using spray paint to using brushes and rollers and a larger variety of fine art painting techniques when I’m in the studio.
The work has evolved in several stages to where I am now, but essentially is becoming more about deconstructing and abstracting the personal experiences I have and making paintings which I hope imbues the feeling of a time/ place/ reference rather than literally recreating the thing itself (if that makes sense). I also realize that underlying it all is my personal understanding of dualities and finding a harmonious merge between chaos and order in both work and life. Painting for me is how I can express and release a lot of the anxious energy, love, anger and constant curiosity that I feel.
You’ve been doing some huge murals for a while, can you tell us about the challenges and process behind getting these up?
Painting huge murals feels like a never-ending learning curve and constant problem-solving activity as much as it is an art exercise. I love the feeling, satisfaction and physical movement that painting huge art brings but with that also comes the stress and strains to your physical body and mind. I try to consider the location and community where I’m painting, which influences how I design a mural. Each wall comes with its own set of logistical challenges such as location, accessibility, obstacles, permissions etc.
My process is ideally having a good image of the wall and even having visited the site in person first. I create pretty comprehensive mock-up designs in Photoshop of what I want to paint and then use whichever grid system I feel is the best fit for the job.
This really helps me with the challenges of communicating what I intend to paint, scaling the work accurately and having good quality reference materials available when I need them.
My experience was learning on the fly, starting on small walls, and gradually working my way up, learning and sharing info with other artists when I had the chance. My personal style, which is more abstract and painterly now, is best learnt through the process as that’s where you’ll develop skills of scaling up, knowing how much paint you’ll need/ use, the brushes that suit you best.
What’s coming up next for you?
I’ve literally just finished a huge commercial mural project at Westfield Knox, which covers over 600m2 of walls, so right now I’m good with taking a break and being in my studio and going surfing again ha! Although there’s a cool mural collaboration in a weeks’ time too.
My partner Clare and I are headed to Japan for the month of August, which is very exciting. Following that I have a couple of mural projects in the pipeline and plan to dedicate more time to my studio practice to flesh out a bunch of ideas and experiments which are brewing. Living and being in the ocean and surfing is a bigger influence on me nowadays so I’ll be exploring that much more in my work and moving forward will align myself with organizations fighting to preserve our environment and coastline.
If readers are interested, I’d recommend looking into and supporting organizations such as:
Climatecouncil.org.au
Surfersforclimate.org.au
Bobbrown.org.au
Foe.org.au
Find out more:
www.davidmeggshooke.com
Follow on the Instagrams:
@houseofmeggs
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