Chopper Art in the News - Herald Sun

Chopper Read's on the canvas

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/chopper-reads-on-the-canvas/story-e6frf7kx-1226023547778

Tom McIlroy

March 18, 2011

Paintings by Chopper Read on display in a new exhibition.

ALREADY an infamous crime figure and best-selling author, Mark "Chopper" Read is adding celebrated artist to his many accolades.

Invoking the biggest names of Australian crime, 22 of Read's original paintings are displayed in a new exhibition that opened last night. Read said the collection, showing at The Hogan Gallery in Collingwood, was inspired by his life of crime.

"I've been interested in painting for a few years, and I thought I should give it a go," he said. "They all have colourful characters in them."

Art lovers can snap up one of the brightly coloured originals, each signed "CHOPPER", for as little as $900. The most expensive work is priced at $3200.

Read said the value of the works would increase dramatically after his death.

"They'll be a bloody good investment for lucky punters in years to come," he said.

The controversial collection features bushranger Ned Kelly and one work called Flowers for Alphonse, inspired by slain underworld figure Alphonse Gangitano. "I planted flowers for Alphonse and I thought they'd be a good painting so I got brushes and acrylic paint and went for it," he said.

Collectors better act quickly - three of the works were snapped up by an unnamed buyer before the exhibition opened.

The exhibition runs until March 31.

"Ned's First Day At Work"

The Artist with "Ned's First Day At Work"

This piece is another in the Ned Kelly series titled "Ned's First Day At Work. Ned's First Bank Job - 8 Thousand Pounds Over The Counter. Thank You Very Much Sir". The canvas is approximately 920mm x 600mm and carries the title of the piece and the artist's signature on the back. You can tell an original Chopper by the signature - Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read - handwritten on the back. 

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read signed on the back

The painting is also signed on the front, bottom right corner, vertical lettering (bottom up) - "CHOPPER" - always in capitals!

Signed "CHOPPER"

This art work depicts Ned's first real success as an outlaw - "8 thousand pounds over the counter. Thank you very much sir". This piece is a rare full-body depiction of Ned Kelly - unlike many other Chopper paintings which are usually depictions from the waist up. It's also rare in the depiction of Ned holding a rifle. The rarity of this painting was reflected in the high price that I paid for it. It's my personal favourite Chopper.

Motivational from Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read

"I'm just a bloody normal bloke. A normal bloke who likes a little bit of torture" - Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read.

Chopper (2000) - The Movie starring Eric Bana

The 2000 film Chopper, starring Eric Bana as Mark Read, was based on stories from Read's books and independent research, leading to events portrayed on screen that somewhat contradicted Read's version. For instance, Read claimed in early books to be vehemently against drugs, but the film portrays him as a casual drug user. In response, Read stated, "You have to have tried something to be able to say you hate it".

Chopper (2000) DVD Cover

"Ned's First Bank Job"

The artist holding the painting just after finishing it

This piece is one of the Ned Kelly series and is titled "Ned's First bank Job". The canvas is approximately 920mm x 600mm and carries the title of the piece and the artist's signature on the back. You can tell an original Chopper by the signature - Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read - handwritten on the back. 

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read signed on the back

The painting is also signed on the front, bottom right corner - "CHOPPER" - always in capitals!

Signed "CHOPPER"

For me, this piece signifies the start of Ned's odyssey in crime. The artist's frequent use of the '$' sign in his paintings is no doubt symbolic of Ned's motivation for his lifestyle choice. Ned's eyes are quite fascinating in this painting - they're very different to others I've seen. Ned almost looks hypnotised - perhaps by the dollars. It is the start of the journey.

Mark Brandon Read - "Chopper Heavy" Beer

Chopper Heavy - Australia's heaviest beer

Chopper Read has allowed use of his name to Australia's heaviest alcoholic lager called "Chopper Heavy". The beer is produced in Rutherglen, Victoria, a town associated with Australia's most notorious outlaw, Ned Kelly.

The Legend and The Beer

Chopper Art in the News - Sydney Morning Herald newspaper

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/chopper-dabbles-in-art/2006/02/03/1138958911119.html

By Richard Jinman

February 4, 2006

Hellraiser … Mark "Chopper" Read with some of his works at the exhibition in Melbourne

MARK "Chopper" Read has a restless muse.

The once notorious criminal has established his credentials as an author and is now forging new paths as a stage performer, rapper and artist.

An exhibition of works by the 51-year-old, who once described himself as a "savage beast", opened at Melbourne's Michael Boyd art gallery last night.

The 25 paintings, priced from $2000 to $7500, include depictions of flowers and several images of Ned Kelly, including one with a woman's breasts.

"It relates to the fact that I think Kelly was a homosexual," Read explained yesterday. "I'm not really a fan of his. I'm tired of people calling me the modern-day Ned Kelly."

Read created four of the works with his friend, the Archibald Prize-winning artist Adam Cullen, who yesterday struggled to recall what the paintings were about.

"I think we were both very inspired the night we made them," laughed Cullen, who is from Sydney.

"I'm very close to Mark, we're very good friends, but I wouldn't call what he does art. He makes cultural ephemera - very important cultural artefacts."

Former criminal Mark "Chopper" Read poses with artist Adam Cullen in front of the painting of him at the Archibald Exhibition at NSW Art Gallery in Sydney.

Read, whose interest in art was once limited to tattoos, has become something of a multimedia phenomenon in recent years. Besides writing a dozen books, he is currently performing a stage show with former footballer Mark "Jacko" Jackson. And then, of course, there's painting - a discipline he says is "relaxing and calming".

Read has also found time to record his first album, a gangsta rap album called Interview with a Mad Man, which is released on March 13. On the opening track, The Heist, he explains how to carry out an armed robbery, and on other tracks he raps about prison life, toe-cutting techniques, getting drunk and a stripper called Pauline.

Read admits he does not listen to a lot of hip-hop, and describes tough guy American rappers such as 50 Cent as "false pretenders". He is thrilled with the album, but says he won't be making another one because "I'm 51 years old and I've got a two-year-old boy - I haven't got the time to waste".

Read was persuaded to make the record by a 23-year-old Melbourne producer, Jaydub.

"I wouldn't say he [Read] was a natural rapper, but he's a natural born storyteller, that's for sure," said Jaydub. "He's a pretty scary guy."

Chopper Art in the News - The Age newspaper

In the frame: Chopper adopts art to make a killing

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/in-the-frame-chopper-adopts-art-to-make-a-killing/2006/02/03/1138958910107.html

By Carolyn Webb

February 4, 2006

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read with one of the works in his new exhibition at Michael Boyd Gallery in Collingwood.

FORMER underworld standover man Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read may have long given up a life of shooting, stabbing and torturing. But for better or worse, the man who spent 23 years in prison for violent crime is now making a killing in the art market — and yes, he's in it for the money.

In four years as a painter, Read has sold more than 126 works for up to $6500 each. His fourth exhibition opened last night at Michael Boyd Gallery in Collingwood, his old stamping ground as a wayward youth.

Read's new reputation was sealed in 2003 at his first exhibition at Fitzroy gallery, Dante's. Fans, the voyeuristic and collectors, looking for good resale value, snapped up all 45 pieces. The State Library of Victoria purchased a Read self-portrait for $1400.

Sydney artist Adam Cullen, now a close friend of Read, inspired the former hitman when he sat for Cullen's entry in the 2002 Archibald Prize.

"I saw his stuff on the wall, and I said to him, 'how much do you charge for this?' " Read recalls. "He said 'I've just sold two to Elton John for $25,000 each.' I thought to myself , 'how long's this shit been going on?', so I got hold of some acrylic paints and a brush and took it up."

He is keen to emphasise that there's no subtext though. "Adam Cullen described it as post-modernist, neo-surrealist rubbish. It looks good up on walls, goes up in price, and fits good into the back of a BMW."

Then Read starts talking about Ned Kelly, whose armoured image appears in six of his 21 works.

A psychiatrist would have a field day. There's the work Kelly Never Died, where four 'Neds', their bodies painted like Read's many tattoos, stand side by side, wielding machine-guns or with hooks for hands.

In The Big Silver Chicken That Ate Ned's Arm, Kelly, wearing a football jumper and with an amputated arm, stands forlornly in an abstract countryside, overshadowed by a silver cartoon bird. When pressed for an analysis, Read sighs, "I think there were so many lies told about Ned Kelly, another lie wouldn't hurt."

Several works depict Kelly as a woman, naked with enormous breasts and legs splayed. In fact, the exhibition has a lot of naked women with enormous breasts, but some of them wield machine-guns.

Like Read, Kelly was a violent criminal in his youth and later became a kind of national character. They even both spent time in Pentridge Prison, albeit a century apart.

Read is sick of the Kelly comparisons but is ambivalent, one minute dismissing Kelly as "an over-rated, overblown bloody poofter", the next saying he's a "great Australian national hero".

Mark Brandon Read - Author

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read is a successful author of crime novels, selling more than 500,000 copies of his works. In recent years, he has made recordings of voice narratives, which have also sold well.

Read's first book, Chopper: From The Inside, was collected from letters he sent while incarcerated in Melbourne's Pentridge Prison and published in 1991.

Mark Brandon Read - CHOPPER: From The Inside

It contains tales and anecdotes of his criminal and prison exploits. Further biographical releases followed in a similar vein. With the advent of Chopper 5: Pulp Faction, Read began writing fictional tales based on his experiences of criminal life. Attempts were made to ban a children's book written by Read titled Hooky the Cripple: The Grim Tale of a Hunchback Who Triumphs.

Hooky the Cripple by Mark Brandon Read

About Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read

Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (born 17 November 1954) is an Australian ex-convict, author and celebrity. He is also a recording and performance artist. The 2000 film Chopper was based on his life.

Chopper (2000) DVD Cover

Early Life

Read was born to an ex-army father and a mother who was a devout Seventh-day Adventist. He was placed in a children's home for the first five years of his life. He grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood, Thomastown, Fitzroy and Preston. He was bullied at school, claiming that by the age of 15, he had been on the "losing end of several hundred fights", and that his father, usually on his mother's recommendation, beat him often as a child. Read was made a ward of the state by the age of 14 and was placed in several mental institutions as a teenager, where, he later claimed, he was subjected to electroshock therapy.

Criminal Activity

By his mid-teens, Read was already an accomplished street fighter and the leader of the Surrey Road gang. He began his criminal career by robbing drug dealers, based in massage parlours in the Prahran area. He later graduated to kidnapping and torturing members of the criminal underworld, often using a blowtorch or bolt cutters to remove the toes of his victims as an incentive for them to produce enough money so that Read would leave them alive.

Mark Brandon Read in the early years

While in Pentridge prison's H division in the late 1970s, Read launched a prison war. His gang, dubbed "The Overcoat Gang" because they wore long coats all year round to conceal their weapons, were involved in several hundred acts of violence against a larger opposing gang during this period. Around this time, Read had a fellow inmate cut both of his (Read's) ears off in order to be able to leave H division temporarily. While in his early biographies Read claimed this was to avoid an ambush by other inmates, by being transferred to the mental health wing, his later works state that he did so to "win a bet". The nickname "Chopper" was given to him long before this, from a childhood cartoon character.

Read was ambushed and stabbed by members of his own gang in a sneak attack, when they felt his plan to cripple every other inmate in the entire division and win the gang war in one fell swoop was going too far. Another theory is that James "Jimmy" Loughnan and Patrick "Blue" Barnes wished to benefit from a contract put on Read's head by the Painters' and Dockers' Union. Read lost several feet of intestine in the attack. Ironically, Jimmy Loughnan was a longtime friend of Read's. Read was, at the time, serving a 16 and a half-year sentence after attacking a judge in an effort to get Loughnan released from prison.

Described variously as witty, charismatic, sadistic and frightening, Read admits to being involved in the killing of 19 people and a further 11 attempts. Many of his associates in the underworld say he is prone to making up numbers to increase his own notoriety and the sales of his books. Read himself has stated several times he would "never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn". In a recent 2007 interview, Read admitted to being involved in the deaths of only four people, all of which were on the grounds of self-defence, he said.

Convicted of crimes including armed robbery, firearm offences, assault and kidnapping, Read spent only 13 months outside prison between the ages of 20 and 38.

A young Chopper

Personal Life

Read contracted Hepatitis C during his time in prison through using a blood-stained shaver. In March 2008 he revealed he only has two to five years to live and requires a liver transplant. However, he has refused to countenance this, stating, "A transplant would save me, but why would anybody give 53-year-old Chopper Read a liver over and above an 11-year-old girl with liver cancer? They wouldn't – and I wouldn't ask. I need a transplant, but I don't want a transplant". He discussed this again in a Herald Sun newspaper article in June 2008. In August 2009, when he was interviewed on ABC Local Radio and was quoted as saying "I haven't had a drop of alcohol for 18 months, I have cirrhosis of the liver... there's no cure for that".

Mark Read in 2009

Welcome to my Blog

Hi all,

This is a blog about my paintings by Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read. I've collected a few of Mark's art works over the last few years and will share them here with you. If you would like to buy any of Chopper's works you can contact Frank Deaney on 0410 502 240.

Frank and Mark out the front of the second-hand shop in Collingwood

 

If you wish to contact me about any of the paintings here, you may do so on: chopper54_at_rocketmail.com

Cheers.