Wanderer Mike Makatron has been spending his young manhood traveling the globe and painting walls and experimenting with styles of art ranging from fantasy illustration to loose and leafy botanicals, with symbols of indigenous spirits, psychedelic mushrooms and plenty of the time honored ying/yang.

A bit of an untethered dude’s dude, the Australian Makatron hit 10 cities and partied and sported his way through them all over the period of a decade or so, painting voluptuous lips, overflowing ashtrays, lush swamps, and multi-storied death burgers; the latter an allusion to what the intro writer Jeremy Taylor refers to as “a ‘McDonaldized’ world” and “addiction, shitty diets, rampant capitalism, psychadelics, (and) even Aboriginal Sovereignty.”

Naturally there is also the hetero kama sutra burger mural spilling with booty and boobs, layered with unclad couples in cozy positions of coital bliss. Many familiar celestial and vaguely sensual/sexual/reproductive motifs are represented, along with tentacled or winged creatures and skulls piled into scenes of space and barren moonscapes. Makatron goes into the wild and everywhere his heart leads; freewheeling in style and subject matter is his norm.

The tightest work is near the end of this travelogue with the artists fine art canvasses – here suddenly tightened and focused, unreal scenes of serenity are deftly rendered in warm detail. A quieted mind is free to wander here and suddenly these otherworldly scenarios begin to appear as though they may be real.

Mike Makatron – In Ten Cities. Trojan Press. Melbourne, Australia. 2015 (photos © Jaime Rojo)

Mike Makatron – In Ten Cities published by Trojan Press. Melbourne, Australia 2015. Click HERE for more info about the artist and the book.

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