Lance Corlett. Portrait by Glenn Wignall
Those who have had a conversation with Lance Corlett (A.K.A Loopy) probably get the feeling they’ve bumped into some character that has been dragged from some abstract political cartoon; he’s one of those people you’re pretty sure you understand but will never completely ‘get’. Lance is a skateboarder-slash-artist (and not the other way around) from Wellington with elusive tendencies making him a hard type to pin down. Putting the skateboarding aspect aside, it is safe to assume that he was one of the few preschool children that chose to use his crayons instead of eating them. Since his inevitable graduation from adolescence, Lance’s surreal personality and creative output have developed loosely around his art, strange situations and one-liners which he executes in his definitive ‘Big Loopy Style’.
Being one of those special individuals, Tha’ Loop Digga has thankfully been gifted with artistic ability instead of an extra chromosome. Lance uprooted from Wellington roughly two years ago to relocate himself in Sydney. Other than the mandatory skating around the city with other ex-Wellingtonians he’s also been commissioned as a painter and sign-writer. Pubs, businesses and occasionally parts of the corporate machine that are eager to ‘art their engines’ have headhunted the self-employed Lance to create anything from dream-like murals to photorealistic paintings and even the occasional dabble in captioning cat photos for their Friday afternoon ‘comedy’ newsletters. The extra money he makes doing this keeps him away from the starving artist stereotype, but the tits-up-a-flagpole nature of his commercial painting belies the modesty when it comes to displaying his personal work.
Chiefy, 2010.
For a long time we only knew of Loopy as a skateboarder and it’s quite possible that up until he moved out of home, only a handful of people knew that he painted as well. There were various objects, paints and canvases available to look at scattered around Lance’s old Hataitai room, but most of the time anyone spent in there was taken up watching the two-channel television or sweeping party stains and rubbish into a hole in the floorboards. Lance never drew attention to any of the work he had lying around and it wasn’t until the television’s premature death (by urination) that his world of colours and creatures delivered a swift kick-box to the head; people actually had to ask him who painted them, to which he would grin, fake a blush and tell us. Some of this work could have been described as “expressionist” but not in the toilet bowl graffiti sense. The characters he painted seemed to be pulled from some back room of his subconscious and were probably quite deep; the rest consisted of architect-accurate buildings and people, all of which Lance littered with traces of his warped sense of humour.
Winter Layers, 2010.
The most recent chapters of Lance’s life have been bookmarked by his bizarre little anecdotes (dubbed Loopyisms) made up of equal parts insight and humour. After buying a second-hand Mercedes Benz for roughly $2000, he parked it at the bottom of a drop so people could skate the boot. It took about twenty minutes before the back of the car was ruined, and with blatant disregard for the money he spent, Lance deadpanned “It’s only life” and kept on filming. Another incident occurred during winter and involved several people using Lance’s shoes in a desperate attempt to warm up the freezing lounge. After being woken up by the smell of burning rubber, Loopy ran downstairs to find people huddled around his only pair of shoes on fire in the middle of the room; surprisingly unfazed, Loopy quipped “at least we’re not on fire” and shuffled back to bed. The only Loopyism to ever suffer a fall-from-grace moment is unfortunately too long to quote in its entirety. It was a joke Lance made up which was basically the plot of the entire Godfather trilogy but set in a jungle temple. This improvised joke/adventure story took over thirty minutes before it staggered to a halt, only for Lance to reveal that he couldn’t deliver the punch line “because no one in the audience was a priest”. If only looks could kill…
Eyes of Cash, 2010.
Since this is a write-up about Lance’s art it may be of some benefit to know his favourite colour (deep fuchsia), his favourite material (black rubber) and his ‘artist alias’ (which is apparently an unpronounceable symbol). If he does decide to focus on skateboarding instead of his art I can only hope he doesn’t follow in Van Gogh’s footsteps and cut off an ear, as they’ve been known to be quite useful for balance. To finish off in Big Loopy Style, he’s asked to present the conclusion in the form of a riddle: “What is the difference between medium and rare?” | Harry Wilson
All artworks copyright Lance Corlett.
First published in Manual #39, September 2010.
