“At the very end of November last year, the big fella TUES and myself boarded a plan in Brisbane to begin a whirlwind trip; in the following 17 days we would visit 10 cities in 5 countries, and do our level best to paint in all of them. The trip wasn’t on a whim. South American writers have been showing a lot of love to Ironlak and we wanted to return the favour, so crazy passport and visa dramas be damned, we were taking our special brand of BBQ Burner love to our amigos in Chile, Brazil and Argentina, and some how managed to wing our way via LA, Miami and NYC.

In the near future the videos and photos of the actual BBQ Burner events will be posted, but like all good trips, many very cool moments also happened outside of the event, and we decided to share them over the course of a couple of blog posts. I’m certainly no photography specialist so please forgive the quality of the iphone pics.

Standing in the ridiculously long immigrations and customs queues in LA after our 14 hour flight, we amused ourselves by discussing whether Sofles and Luke Shirlaw, who had arrived on a previous flight, would be waiting to meet us. After entertaining various possibilities, Tues bet on the likelihood that Luke would be working away on his laptop and Sofles would be asleep. This is what we finally cleared customs to find:

Score one for Big TUES. We picked up the rental, Shirlaw claimed the wheel and boldly ventured out into the LA traffic, first stop to visit the friendly gentlemen at Ironlak Los Angeles, see the store and to stock up on some artistic supplies. By the time we rolled out of the Hollywood Blvd store, we had been in Los Angeles for at least an hour and a half and were yet to paint or drink. Unacceptable behaviour by our standards, so we made a beeline for Venice Beach, where we hoped to get a chance to hit the iconic beach walls with a quick detour to the bottle-O (aka liquor store) to source one of those giant American beers we had heard so much about and a pitstop at the best named intersection in LA, the corner of Palms and Inglewood.

Shortly before sunset we arrived iconic Venice Beach, and managed to talk ourselves into a prime spot. Wasting no time, SOFLES, TUES and myself got down to business, albeit in bare feet and with pretty girls wandering past in on the sand. We finished just as it began to get dark and got to enjoy watching the sun set over the ocean on our first night in the City of Angels.

The next day good friends of Ironlak DABS & MYLA had laced us with a spot in Hollywood. We invited along LA’s own KOPYE and were joined by fellow Aussie adventurers DVATE and ASKM.

While we painted the spot, right off Hollywood Blvd, we were graced with semi-humorous commentary by the local homeless drunk Red, who’s alley we were painting in. KOPYE laced one of his trademark ill characters to compliment our pieces.

Pieces finished, a feed was high on the agenda and TUES has a thing for wings. We had already samples Popeye’s, and the big guys favourite Wingstop was closed, so it was decided we should try the wings at another American institution, Hooters.

With a gut full of Chicken ‘n’ Beer (whatup Luda!) we rolled back to the hotel with two pieces in two days and started making plans for the next days flight to Miami and Art Basel.

Stay tuned….!” -DirtyHarry.