The Islands Where We Left Our Ancestors ~> Book Tour

Dates and places will be updated here, subject to change (but hopefully not too much change!)

Buy the book here ~> ships from July, after which point you can TOTALLY buy it from bookstores all across Australia.

EVENTS ~> Launches / performances made from the book / and other cool stuff: I’d love to see you there!!

Nipaluna / Hobart launch: July 12, Friday 6-8pm at the Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre. Exhibition opening / Performances / Book signings / Wine. FREE ENTRY.

Naarm / Melbourne launch: July 25, Thursday 6-8pm at the Museo Italiano, Faraday Street, Carlton. To be launched by Bernard Caleo. Exhibition opening / Performance / Booksignings / Wine. FREE ENTRY

MORE COMING, so stay toon’d.

Book cover reveal!

Here it is! The cover of my next book 

THE ISLANDS WHERE WE LEFT OUR ANCESTORS

Coming out July 2, 2024 through those awesome people at @scribepub who've been really championing great Australian graphic novels. So grateful this is happening.

Preorder now

New music for Bing/Santospirito

Go here to buy/listen

Music for Opera #1 ~ High drama on the water

Three pieces for violin and piano, recorded on a river.

Raw recordings, unmixed and unmastered, these pieces were captured whilst the band was recording compositions for a theatre play (A Mouthful of 'C' Words for Mona Foma 2023).

Natalya had been recovering from Covid during the sessions and originally we had thought these warm-up pieces were just throwaway improvised fragments. We changed our minds after repeated listens. Somehow we seemed to have channelled some gothic emotions, maybe bubbling up from the violent history of the area.

During these sessions Josh was awake at 5am on the deck above the water and witnessed his first rakali; a beautiful native Australian mammalian water-rat with a splendid white-tipped tail. In Robbie Arnott's book 'Flames' there is a rakali river god dwelling in the South Esk River (in Northern lutruwita / Tasmania).

credits

releases June 1, 2023

Bing/Santospirito are
Natalya Bing - Violin
Joshua Santospirito - Piano

Studio recording - Jethro Pickett
Studio dog - Juno
Photo - Ursula Woods

Long Weekend turned 10 years old and is now SOLD OUT

Just as The Long Weekend in Alice Springs turned 10 years old I realised that I had no more copies left. Sadly it won’t be available for a while until I scrape together enough money for the FIFTH printing of the book. I’m hoping I can figure out how to do that somehow and will let you know when it happens.

In the meantime I’d like to thank everyone who has bought a copy over the last ten years, it is now precisely 3000 hard copies sold and I have absolutely no clue how many people have read the online versions that float about.

In the meantime you can watch this film version of the book we made for Mona Foma 2016 and Something Somewhere Film Festival 2017.

I GOT A BOOK DEAL !!

>>   Hot off the press   <<
I GOT A BOOK DEAL WITH SCRIBE PUBLICATIONS
 

The 200 page graphic novel will come out in mid-2024, 
and I'm pleased as punch!

For those of you who've read Swallows Part One you'll be pleased to hear that, although the title doesn't reflect it, this is effectively the second part in the series. 

When I began writing Swallows Part One as far back as 2013 I imagined it being a series of projects through which I could have a long-term conversation with readers about migration and identity. It was back then that I wrote the earliest fragments of what I had imagined would be called Swallows Part Two. 

Cut to 2018 and I travelled with my parents Tony and Beverley to the Aeolian Islands where I hoped to do some research for the book, island hopping across the Italian archipelago. I wanted to look into why my ancestors left the islands in search of a new life. Exploring this might give me a larger sense of why anyone migrates. I'd been to these islands once before, a decade earlier, but I'd never been there in Summer ... my goodness, what an amazing holiday that was. I got plenty of raw material to work with and did a lot of sketching whilst I was there. 

A year later in 2019 I took a draft of this book to the third Comic Art Workshop residency in the Hawkesbury River and got some (pretty positive) feedback from my gang of graphic novelists which spurred me on. 

Below is a photo of me at the Moonah Art Centre in late 2020 after I'd finished inking the book. 

During Covid lockdowns I managed to ink the entire book and then I finished digitally colouring the book in early 2022. I sent it to a few publishers, some of whom even wrote back to me saying some nice things about it but none of whom thought they could publish it until Scribe contacted me asking to publish it. I was super pleased with this, they're a book publisher bringing graphic novels into their list, having published Sam Wallman, Tommi Parrish, as well as graphic novel by Luke & Kelly Jackson with Mara White. Some of you know about my ongoing rants about how comics are excluded from literary spaces, so you can imagine how stoked I am to have a publisher who's addressing this issue. 

Scribe also publish some of my favourite non-comics writers like Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Kim Mahood and Laura Jean Mackay. 

In literary magazine news
The Nanna Project continues, in which I have been curating an 8 page comics for each issue of Island magazine. The most recent issue has a majestic piece by Leonie Brialey in it. I have long admired Leonie's work and it feels pretty satisfying to give her free rein across 8 pages. 

I'm super stoked to publish a 6 page comic in the most recent issue of The Suburban Review and a 7 page comic in Rat World over in Aotearoa this month. If you want to support literary magazines that support comics - then subscribe to those fine magazines. 

Below is a photo (by Adelaide Reisz) of me at the Island magazine launch yabbering on about comics in literary spaces (as per usual). 

Thanks for reading this far down. 
I'm impressed!! 

May 11 is TEN YEARS TO THE DAY since we (myself and Craig San Roque) launched The Long Weekend in Alice Springs up in Mparntwe at Watch This Space gallery. I'm unable to get up there to put on an event to mark the occasion, so I decided to organise one down in nipaluna / Hobart. We're combining my two favourite things ->> BANDS and COMICS. Come along to Graphical Storytimes at Simple Cider, (FACEBOOK EVENT). See the poster below for details. 

I've also started a new band with Michael Schlitz ... we couldn't come up with a good name in time so we're playing as the Shit Slippers for one night only. 

Album - The Quoll, by Bing/Santospirito

Our new album is out as of yesterday! We’re so proud of it. Buy it at my shop, or from Scratch Match Records.

You can purchase the 12” vinyl LP (with gatefold cover, replete with art by me) at our Bandcamp site.

Hi,

I've got heaps of news. I'm really excited to invite you to my first proper commercial exhibition. I'm pretty proud of the artworks and I hope you enjoy them in all their weirdness and moodiness.

Exhibition catalogue here - sneak in and buy one before the show even starts!
All works are for sale through Penny Contemporary: contactable by phone or email if you can't make it to the show in person. Penny Contemporary is at 187 Liverpool Street Hobart. There won't be an opening for the exhibition due to the current situation so I'm sad I won't be able to see all of you in one spot, but I hope you'll still be able to see the show regardless.

I created a large amount of these works at Cradle Mountain National Park in 2021. Much thanks to Arts Tas and Parks Tasmania for letting me do that wonderful residency.

Our new album is released Feb 9

The Quoll 12" vinyl records have landed and they look pretty amazing. I conceived of the cover as an elaborate art catalogue from the broader project of The Quoll. The recording itself is the live concert from last year's performances at St David's cathedral where Natalya Bing (the violinist on the right with the snorkel) and I (guitarist on the right in the black wetsuit) teamed up with Randal Muir (didn't come snorkelling with us) on the largest pipe organ in Tasmania. Published with the help of Scratch Match Records.

Buy the LP now

Wednesday the 9th, 7pm Australian EST (GMT 8am) you can join us on our YouTube channel when we launch the record by releasing the full concert film which was filmed at St David's cathedral at Mona Foma 2021, also starring Sally Rees as the Quoll.

Click on the Facebook event for reminders

Cradle

Recent adventures for The Quoll - these drawings is from my residency at Cradle Mountain National Park in lutruwita.

Making comics

I got to make a video with the Moonah Arts Centre in conjunction with the Comic Art Workshop about the graphic novel making process, chatting about both my own process and then the process of Alyssa Bermudez.

Lock Down Read Group

GPS - Global Possum Sensitivity

Just something cute to cheer you all up during isolation.

Quit Your Day Job

So after about 15 years of working I go a hefty amount of leave and I quit my job and took it as a lump sum so I could take possibly up to a year off from work and make art.

Whenever I told people what I did for a crust the most common response was “Oh wow, that sounds really full on” which I always found a little difficult to respond to really. I must admit I’m a little burned out, not because the work I did was difficult, I was good at it and I enjoyed the clients and my colleagues … the main reason was the management. The Public Service doesn’t always have the best support structures. I’m sure you know this, it’s not a revolutionary statement. I mean … if your colleagues and management are good and supportive then I think most of us could do really shithouse jobs. Nursing and health is subject to human-frailties as much as anywhere. In the last few years we got a doozy of a manager and it took its toll … so when my long service leave came up I guess I decided to look after myself.

I might post from time to time about the shift in my life from working person to artist. I don’t think I’ll be making much money-making art over the next year, perhaps I’ll take on a few jobs … not sure yet. My main focus will be to work on my favourite projects - Sydney/Purgatorio and Swallows. Both are graphic novels. I think I can complete Swallows and maybe make a reasonable dent in Sydney/Purgatorio before the end of my year off and need to return to making money again.

Wish me luck!

Island magazine 157

I was recently asked by Jude Abell, art editor at Island magazine if I’d like to be their art feature for the June 2019 issue as she was aware that I was working on a couple of graphic novel projects. We decided an excerpt from my work in progress Swallows 2 might be a good fit. I cheekily said that Island should ALSO let me do the art for the cover of that issue and so I made a basic mock-up of what I might do. To my surprise the editor-in-chief at Island Vern Field said she was interested. And now I get to reveal the cover!

Storygraph - Darwin exhibition

Storygraph - an exhibition in Darwin of the Northern Territory's comic art 

Exhibition opening 3rd May 6pm
Exhibition ends 1st of June

If you're lucky enough to be up in Parap, Darwin, then head down to the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art to see an exhibition with three artists: Beth Sometimes (a multimedia artist Alice Springs), Jonathon Saunders (an animator from Darwin) and myself. Here is Hamish McDonald's curatorial rationale 

StoryGraph brings together three Territory artists working in the area of graphic storytelling. You can call them zines, comic books, graphic novels, and in the film world, animations, cartoons, or any number of terms, but in all instances artists are using visual means to convey a narrative as much as they are using words - whether their own, or those of other writers.

These forms are enjoying an explosion of popularity at the moment, from Japanese anime through to Hollywood adaptations of Marvel comics, and Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ series. But while these might be the titles that leap to mind in the mainstream consciousness, graphic storytelling is happening everywhere and on every level, and its moving way beyond the aesthetics of the comic book.

In 2013 Joshua Santospirito illustrated Craig San Roque’s story, ‘The Long Weekend in Alice Springs’, which drew on the author’s experience of working as a psychologist in Alice Springs. Taking us on a journey from Alice Springs to ancient Sumeria, and exploring the Jungian notion of the ‘cultural complex’, this extraordinary work delves into the lives of a cohort of Indigenous characters as they gather in Alice for a weekend of footy and family. Santospirito’s black and white illustrations can be haunting, exquisite, and confronting, but at all times they are visually engaging and propel the narrative forward with powerful force.

Darwin artist Jonathan Saunders has created his own Indigenous superhero, Zero-Point. In a post-human world, a superhero from Darwin emerges to fight government conspiracy and masked foe who proclaims himself to be the king of Australia. Supported by Screen Australia and Screen Territory, and drawing on a team of talented locals, Saunders has created four episodes of his superhero’s story as a web TV series.

Born in New Zealand/Aotearoa, but now based in Alice Springs/Mparntwe, Beth Sometimes is an artist working across many media and practices. Her zine,’The Tender Unravelling’, is a refreshingly non-linear and poignant meditation on a series of incidents and interactions in Alice Springs over a few days.

Old blog

Well it is now time to retire my old wordpress and join the modern world with a proper website.

If you’re interested in what I did prior to this here website - then feel free to have a browse over at http://joshuasantospiritoart.com where you’ll find all sorts of videos and images and comics to read. I’ll keep it up as a record.