The Gallery
“Artwork and Play” is the online art gallery of Ben Hartnett, an Australian artist whom I generally refer to as “me”, “myself”, or often the easier to remember and spell “I” (although these all seem to be extremely common names so I’m thinking of replacing them with “Squitch”, “Blurgle” and “F”).
Strictly speaking, “Artwork and Play” isn’t a completely accurate title since it’s not just work and play but also personal pieces (therefore not work) with serious themes (not play). While some of this art is definitely aimed at adults, I avoid things like coarse language, sexual content and gore so there shouldn’t be anything here to fry an unsuspecting kid’s brain! There may be increasing levels of weirdness as more ideas escape from my skull, however. Just warning you.
The Artist
For those who are fascinated with such things, my professional art history began in high school with regular freelance cartoon illustrations for a newspaper. This continued through a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Animation in Brisbane, which in turn led to a job working in post-production on television commercials in various basic roles. These ranged from simple digital cleanup work to both hand-drawn and 3D design and animation with a few other tasks inbetween, and included getting to work in a number of different styles on some interesting projects with some cool people.
Next came hand-drawn key animation for an Internet product, which was a lot of fun thanks to great creative flexibility and a good team. Health issues ended that position and since then I’ve been doing odds and ends of freelance work, some of which is on this site.
I’m interested in a lot of areas of visual art, including not just animation and cartooning but comic books, special and visual effects, picture books, novel illustration, computer games, movies, comic strips, gallery art, drive-thru eyeball tattooing and so on.
Ideally, I’d like to grow this site with bits and pieces from all of these forms (except for drive-thru eyeball tattooing) as time goes by. Meanwhile, I hope you are ecstatically overjoyed by your frolic through “Artwork and Play with the Addition of Pieces Which Are Neither Work Nor Play Because They Are Personal With Serious Themes” (or just “Artwork and Play”. How about “A&P”?).
Well, that’s enough about squitch. F should probably force blurgle back to work. Or play. Or a personal piece with- No! Must… stop… typing!
Enjoy.
- Ben Hartnett