Chris Fletcher was born in California in 1966 to a political scientist and a zoologist both of whom were attending Berkley University. “I think I was “unplanned” as my mother gave up her career in Zoology and set about raising me and my older sister. She did this very haphazardly in between bird watching, drinking heavily and running a farm near Stanthorpe.” Chris’s mother died of leukaemia 12 years later. His father (who is still alive) is from Hanover Vermont and Berkley in the sixties was an eye opener for him because ever since he has written on the far left of politics. “He took a job at the University of Queensland in 1972 when I was five years old and we all followed. The transition was a shock for me. I went from a free and liberal home environment to a strict and nasty little concrete state school in Brisbane overnight. Uniforms, parades and saluting the flag and all that stuff.” Later Chris was sent to private school based on the Steiner system and he discovered how to be “himself” in the art room. At age ten he began making fairly sophisticated little sculptures of mutilated clay bodies filled with paint. They would ooze red when you squeezed them. And of course he did loads of painting there. Chris is also a member of punk band The Splatterheads, his brilliant mind and creative talent intrigues me – I asked him a few more questions.
Kirra – What was the crossover point with The Splatterheads? Tell me a little about the history of the band, you and the punk scene.
Chris – In 1984 I was living on Brisbane’s south side where rent was cheap. There were a couple of other blokes living in the house who were really into punk and American hard-core records. At first I found the music a bit shocking, but within a week or so I felt liberated by it. Queensland was a police state back then and the raw, rebellious attitude of punk music was irresistible to suppressed young men like us. One of the guys in the house was a screen printer and we made our own punk T-shirts. There was a great sense of purpose within the local punk scene which was very small then. We all felt misunderstood and that was cool. I was going to night classes at the Brisbane institute of Fine Art, but there was nothing really radical happening there and I was the youngest student by about twenty five years. I had a very strong feeling that if I didn’t start my own band I was going to miss something very important. At about this time I was walking home from art school one night, I had a Radio Birdman print on the back of my jacket. This police car stopped, they got out and implied that I was in some sort of gang and asked me a lot of stupid questions about the jacket and the gang I was in. They searched my pockets. In those days you could go to jail for having a joint. I knew I had to get out of Queensland or I’d be in jail before long. So I dropped out of art school and hitch hiked to Sydney. I met up with old friends who had also escaped from Brisbane and four of us ended up living in a terrace house in Surry Hills. The girl (Mage) committed suicide in the bath within a few weeks of moving in. The three others remaining: Peter Thompson, Micky Scott and I, decided we had no alternative but to start a band. We couldn’t really play but we threw ourselves into it with savage energy. I was singing and writing lyrics while the other two made up the rhythm section. Not long afterwards we were joined on guitar by Adrian Carroll and then by Sly Faulkner on second guitar and vocals. We took our name from a Rodger Ramjet episode where Rodger refers to some local louts as a bunch of “Splatter heads”. By 1988 we had released our first album The Filthy Mile followed by Ink of a Mad Man’s Pen in 1989, Bot the Album in 1993, Joined at the Head in 1996 at which point we broke up, reforming and releasing The Splatter Platter in 2010.
Kirra – When did you decide you were going to be an artist and move to Stanthorpe?
Chris – I was sick of the city. The band had been going for ten years, had achieved everything and yet nothing. Some of it was good and some of it bad but our music took us all around Australia and Europe. We’d bottomed out financially and I felt it wasn’t going anywhere. Ironically that was the time when Nirvana was cracking it huge and bands like us were getting record deals, but by then it was too late. I was sick of it and sick of the city. My ears were ringing and my guitar fretting hand was worn out from playing power chords at a million miles an hour.
In 1996, my grandfather was living in a really huge old New England house in New Hampshire. He’d been an architect, was now 90 and on his own so I went and stayed with him. I Enrolled in the local art school and took classes in painting, drawing and Abstract Expressionism. I worked as a gallery assistant, waited tables and delivered pizza to pay for the classes. They were therapy for me and helped me to get over the band. I Returned to Australia in 1998 and landed in Stanthorpe, I think it was because I knew people here and it was laid back. My mother had owned a fruit farm in the area and I spent half my childhood playing amongst the creeks, the fruit trees and the granite boulders. The landscape left an impression on me.
Kirra – What is your favourite medium to work in?
Chris – I’m an oil painter. I make studies in pencil and watercolour or acrylic and when I’m sort of sure of the dimensions, I stretch a canvas to size. My oil paintings take about three or four weeks to complete. When I get stuck I go back and make more studies.
Kirra – What is your favourite subject matter and why?
Chris – When I was boy the landscape became a fantasy world of cowboys and Indians. As an adult I escape the city when I go into the bush to paint. The two are different but linked. There is a layering of meaning. Painting is a perfect way to condense my emotions into some order because I am emotionally charged by everything in my realm of experience. Painting helps me understand I have a certain relationship with nature and another relationship with people. The things that occupy me emotionally the most at the time are the things that become my favourite subject matter.
Kirra – If you had to choose……Art or Music and why?
Chris – I’m more comfortable with the idea of doing art than music. My music tends to a be kind of performance art. I’m a very visual bloke and I’m not very technically proficient with music.
Kirra – What are you most passionate about?
Chris – Sex
Kirra – What’s your idea of perfect happiness?
Chris – I could live well being stranded in magical cabin with my wife Justine and my paints and brushes
Kirra – Which living person do you most admire?
Chris – Tom Spence
Kirra – What’s your favourite roadtrip? why?
My most memorable road trip was when we took Tom Spence to his home town Muttaburra. He was playing in the Dirt Band and we were touring Western Queensland. A lot of dirt roads and camping with Tom in his wheelchair, it was a holy mission. There was a documentary made about it by Sean Kennedy.
Kirra – Which word/phrase do you most overuse?
Chris – I don’t want to…
Kirra – Greatest success/triumph?
Chris – My latest painting…do you wanna see it?
Kirra – Favourite band/writer/artist?
Chris – Foremost in my mind is the Ken Whisson show called As If ( MCA Sydney Oct-Nov. Free curator’s tour Sept 29 3pm).
Chris is currently exhibiting in the “Art on Amiens” Art Trail on Amiens Rd Stanthorpe. Contact Emma at Nest Gallery www.nestgallery.com.au for more information.
You can see more of Chris’s work here – Chris Fletcher – Artist.
The Splatterheads Chris Fletcher, Sly Faulkner, Matt Oliver and Marty Bungle are playing at The Sando, King St Newtown, on the 28th of September.
