Ben Toupein - "Unbillable Hours"

Come and see Ben’s Exhibition during the month of March!

When I grow up I want to be a cartoonist or  someone who
draws’. Well lucky for me that ended up happening.
Unfortunately I mostly draw for other people and draw things
that are pretty boring.

Working steadily as a commercial artist for the last 10 or
so years has been good but at the end of the day all I want
to do is put the pencil down and slip away into something
else. So for these works I tried to do something different.
Squish all the things rattling around inside my brain and
spurt them out on the page without really thinking about it.
Just start drawing and see what comes out. As this happened
I started to see some patterns emerging and it started to
remind me of really slick production art from the 70’s and
80’s. Especially things like pinball playfields, skate-
boards, comic and magazine covers. Back when it seemed a lot
of the time someone up top really wasn’t paying attention to
the artwork that was getting shipped out. Which meant a lot
of far out things got put out into the world that would
probably be very sanitised now or noted to death.

So creating these with that in mind I started to work things
into motives and symbols. Eventually creating something that
I would have liked to see on a pinball machine, skateboard
or magazine cover as a kid and would be desperate to know
what the image was selling on the inside. Using techniques
so the image in a perfect world could have been recreated
commercially at scale, flat vibrant colours, big shapes.

Get in touch at mail@bentoupein or see more of my work at
bentoupein.com or on @bentoupein

Works

1. ʻLighthouse’ - Acrylic on board $600
2. ʻWalk it Off’ - Acrylic on board $600
3. ʻJackpot’ - Acrylic on board $600