ArtBarge-A Virtual Gallery Experience: Paul Rasche

I was born in 1975 in Melbourne, Australia, and was raised there in the suburbs with my two brothers, in a blissful archetype of middle-class existence. My childhood was one of cartoons, video games and BMXs - that's about all i can remember, but i remember it fondly. Graduated high school in 92 with no idea of what kind of career (if any) i was interested in. Despite the fact that I had been drawing cartoons, writing stories, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and making personalised greeting cards for my family and friends since i was in kindergarten, i still hadn't caught on that I could be an artist.

From 1993-1995 I earnt a bachelor degree in psychology from La Trobe University, and after being subjected to the all the bullshit of this discipline that is obsessed with nothing else than it's own credibility as an actual science, immediately enrolled in a professional writing course, where i topped the class in the creative-type subjects - Short Story Writing and Screenplay Writing. I didn't go on to complete the course due it's high cost and lack of desirable subject availability, and instead took up a full-time office job.

Six months later, in 1997, my close friend Robert went to visit his parents in Saudi Arabia for 3 months, and for his return, I created a short comic book detailing what had happened among our social circle in his absence. The comic, Clivefeld (a parody of Seinfeld) was extremely well-received by all my friends, and it was much photocopied and dragged out at parties. Inspiration struck. I started working on a new comic book about my office job, called Office Boy. Within 18 months I had created over 130 pages of it, divided it into 4 separate issues and had it on the shelves at local comic books shops. In the meantime I had taken a correspondence course in Freelance Illustration and Cartooning. I quit my job to take advantage of a government scheme to train the unemployed in small business management, and started working as a freelance illustrator, after teaching myself all the relevant software.

I finally knew what I was on Earth for.

After a year or so of freelancing i started noticing that i was having the same (though milder) feelings of creative frustration as i had experienced in studying psychology, because i was working for non-creative idiot clients creating software flowcharts and business cards. So I started working on my own project - no briefs, no clients saying, "can you just change this...?", just pure art instead of graphic design.

The Nonesuch series of images were created with an idea of some sort of story arc that links them, and could perhaps end up as a graphic novel or something, but every time i tried to write something to accompany these images, the result was unsatisfactory, and i had no idea what order the pages even went in. I stored the images away on my hard drive and started working for clients again, this time it was mainly for children's publishers MightyBook.com (USA), CityScape Books (UK), Black Dog Books (AUS) and a few others. After a long stretch of that, i started feeling that old frustrated feeling again, and dragged the Nonesuch pictures out.

Lo and behold, i discovered that i liked them just the way they are and decided to put them out there. And here we are.





					I was born in 1975 in Melbourne, Australia, and was raised there in the suburbs with my two brothers, in a blissful archetype of middle-class existence. My childhood was one of cartoons, video games and BMXs - that's about all i can remember, but i remember it fondly. Graduated high school in 92 with no idea of what kind of career (if any) i was interested in. Despite the fact that I had been drawing cartoons, writing stories, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and making personalised greeting cards for my family and friends since i was in kindergarten, i still hadn't caught on that I could be an artist. From 1993-1995 I earnt a bachelor degree in psychology from La Trobe University, and after being subjected to the all the bullshit of this discipline that is obsessed with nothing else than it's own credibility as an actual science, immediately enrolled in a professional writing course, where i topped the class in the creative-type subjects - Short Story Writing and Screenplay Writing. I didn't go on to complete the course due it's high cost and lack of desirable subject availability, and instead took up a full-time office job.
			"Data Entry Hell" by Paul Rasche





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