Currently taking place at Name This Bar in Darlinghurst, Sydney, is the summer 2012 season of Art Battles Australia. This fortnightly event pits two artists against each other. Producing a mural in front of a live, cheering audience, the winner on the night progresses through to the semis and hopefully finals in the end.

Two rounds have already taken place and next up, on thursday February 16, it’s the turn of myself, The Flying Dutchman, against PixelSix, which will no doubt be an interesting collision. So swing by, have a drink, and make some noise in support of the arts.

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I’ve been the resident portrait photographer at the Alternative Miss Ireland for sixteen years. It is without doubt the wildest night to be had in Ireland and raises an incredible amount of money for Irish HIV/AIDS organisations. The 18th and final pageant will be held on March 18 in the Olympia Theatre, Dublin.

Band of Skulls vocalist and bassist Emma Richardson has explored a new creative outlet by releasing her first solo exhibition Crusin’ for a Bruisin’, a series of drawings and large-scale work created in response to her bands music. The artwork is currently showing at the Londonewcastle Project Space in London.

Held bi-weekly at comic creator Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel message boards, the “Remake / Remodel” threads are genre bending exercises in re-imagining old comic and pulp concepts. Artists of every skill level and discipline create their interpretations of the chosen topic and display the finished product within the thread. Results vary but there are always outstanding and thought provoking ideas presented. Captain Future And His Amazing Lab Goons is the current theme.

Acclaimed Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong’s latest art installation, Golden Ghost (The Future Belongs to Ghost), invites audience members into a vast field of industrial thread waste to search for three gold necklaces planted by the artist. The audience member who is fortunate enough to find it, can keep the treasure. The day I visited, there were quite a few excited children looking. The work is playful as visitors climb through tonnes and tonnes of thread waste, while serving as a metaphor for excess consumption at both the global and individual level.

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Filmmaker Peter Greenaway, who is best known for his controversial and visually lavish films, was recently a guest of Santiago a Mil Arts Festival in Chile. As part of the program, Greenaway presented a 90 minute live cinema experience on four screens, which was a mix of magnificent visual and aural chaos.

Greenaway was located on a small stage in the centre of a park opposite the Chile Government House, where he mixed and cut up his own evocative images with stock footage inspired by the life of the Welsh writer and perennial prisoner, Tulse Luper, who archived his entire life in 92 suitcases. Before the screening, Greenaway talked about his criticism of how cinema has not developed from its original platform and how it does not satisfy the imagination of the new iPad and laptop interactive generation. The films then began and on cue and a pack of street dogs howled and ran through the crowd throughout the performance, much like a scene out of one of Greenaway’s films, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

Blackfield is an installation created by London-based artist Zadok Ben David.

The artwork is based on Victorian botanical illustrations transformed into more than 12,000 steel cut plants growing up from the sand carpet covering the gallery floor. The name Blackfield is obvious, until you walk around the artwork, and the black field of flowers is transforming into a sparkling field of colors. Each flower is a wonderful, detailed work of art.

In 1986, Paul Hogan exposed to the rest of the world that there is something a bit “odd” about Australians. I’m not sure it’s something that we’ve actively tried to live down in the decades since, but I’m going to hazard a guess that sending thousands upon thousands of bikini-clad Aussies off shore on giant inflatable lilo Havaianas annually does not help this reputatation.

The Havaianas Australia Day Thong Challenge has become an iconic, world record-breaking event across five states in Australia, and this year, registrations are still available for those hoping to get involved. I’d like to say that these human-on-thong formations are visible from out of space, but that is unconfirmed. What is confirmed is that it’s the most fun you can be having this Australia Day, and you don’t even have to leave your clothes on.

Everything Is Electrified is my new exhibition that launches in Camden on January 20th. The paintings are a departure from my normal figurative painting and use mixed media to create grand skies with pylons and transmissions towers dotted across the horizon. I find these man-made structures strangely cinematic and alluring.

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Our crew at Doss Blockos Pale Lager were tipped off about an abandoned brewery three levels beneath the streets of New York. Vids from a lifetime squatter and tunnel dweller have given us hope that we can find it by following coded signs from the Mole People that live in the tunnels.

East Ninth Brewing are running a competition to find the final member of our team to head to New York. We are after an adventurer who can bring an invaluable skill to the rest of the team, which includes our tunnel-dwelling guide, a doco crew, the original Doss Blockos gang from Melbourne and some local protection.

Nothing in the discarded subway system is easy to find, not even an entire brewery, and this is likely to be a once in a lifetime experience for any traveller, documentary maker, journalist or beer drinking NYC enthusiast who is prepared to brave the unknown tunnels with us in search for the brewery lost beneath New York City.

Enter our competition by writing down your unique skills on the back of a Doss Blockos brown bag – which your beer comes in. Take a photo and email it to me@beneathnyc.com or post the original to East Ninth Brewing 20 Chatham St Prahran by February 27th 2012.

This Brisbane City Council street art initiative is getting artists to paint the traffic signal boxes at intersections. 2010’s award recipient, Penelope Donovan, says it’s a great way to get your work out there, despite the prescribed nature of the brief. It’s all run by Urban Smart Projects.

Noir City is back for their tenth year at the historic Castro Theater in late January, dishing up the best of film noir classics. Double-features on a bargain with people who similarly appreciate this underestimated art form. Nothing better than that.

The marketing brainchild of LocalTraders, the Watching Paint Dry Championships is an online challenge in which contestants are asked to ‘send in a picture of themselves watching paint dry and state the longest time they’ve managed to stare at a wall of drying paint without looking away’. They ‘also want to know your favourite paint colour and why’. All for a good cause of course. An iPad for the winner. Now, get to watching …

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Do you ever get bored of just going out to the same old clubs and events and wish for something with a little more pizazz? Shien Lee, the glamourous mastermind behind Dances of Vice knows just how you feel. Since 2007, Shien has been bringing her sparkle to the nightlife of New York, to create fun, memorable events that attract people from all walks of life.

Each event comes with a theme and Lee carefully curates the acts who will lend their talents to each one. Enthusiasts from around the world arrive in elaborate costumes to be dazzled by burlesque performers, vaudeville acts, and entertainers of various other stripes. You never know who you’ll run into there and I’ll never tell. I can also guarantee that you’ll never forget.

Nathan Sawaya’s newest collection is currently showing at Sydney’s Town Hall. The exhibition, The Art of The Brick, runs until February 5 and showcases his three dimensional LEGO sculptures and over-sized portraits. Sawaya’s largest sculpture is a dinosaur skeleton measuring about 20 meters long. It took him a whole Summer to complete.

With over 60 artists participating this year, The Ellen Art Show is a charity event featuring portraits of popular talkshow host and activist, Ellen DeGeneres. The profits for the show are donated to the Trevor Project, which is ‘determined to end suicide among LGBTQ youth by providing life-saving and life-affirming resources and advocacy/educational programs that create a safe, supportive and positive environment for everyone’. The Ellen Art Show, the brainchild of spoken word artist Renda Writerr, will take place at The Terrell Moore Gallery in Los Angeles on January 28 (DeGeneres’s birthday).

Having been to many a festival in the past, but never a Homebake, I was excited about my first time experience, and to say I was impressed would be an understatement. What a fabulously different festival experience!

Such a wide variety of ages: from your classic old rockers (there to see Grinderman and Icehouse), to your hipsters (also there to see Grinderman and Icehouse, but with some Architecture and Helsinki and Pnau thrown in for good measure), to everyone in between. Personal favourites of the day were Illy (especially It Can Wait, featuring Owl Eyes), Drapht (particularly the collaboration with 360 and 1200 technics wowza!), Icehouse, and who doesn’t love a bit of Triple J artist of the year, Goyte, with some Kimbra. Homebake is exactly what it claims to be — a day dedicated to remarkable Australian and New Zealand music.

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We’ve all heard the story of how Banksy smuggled one of his own artworks into the MOMA. Now Melbourne’s Cullen Hotel is reversing the challenge, inviting guests to try and steal a signed Banksy original off their walls. Yup, ‘Stay the Night, Steal The Art’. If you succeed without getting caught, it’s yours to keep ($15,000 value). But if you get nabbed, it goes back on the wall for the next guest to have a crack. The hotel recommends against using ‘an angle grinder, but you will need plenty of guile and cunning’. Indeed!

Cynthia von Buhler’s Speakeasy Dollhouse is a biographical tale of murder, mafia, and intrigue in New York City told with handmade dolls and sets, in conjunction with an immersive play. It was initially set for a two-night run, limited only to it’s Kickstarter supporters. However, due to overwhelming interest, von Buhler added a Halloween show, and plans to add more dates and locations in the new year.

This is an Audience Participation project I am working on as an experiment in improvisation and new ways of thinking. I am asking people to suggest what happens next and each chosen participant will receive all the illustrations in a handmade book.

I hope by the end to have created some work that I would never have expected of myself and I also hope that it could be an interesting organic project for people to interact with. It’s an open brief. Do what you will with him: be merciful or horribly wicked. The stranger the better.