Café a gateway to rare blend of art and initiative

West Melbourne’s Blender Studios now has a café that aims to bridge the gap between the multi-faceted street art enterprise and its local community. Meanwhile founder Adrian Doyle is going hard on an extraordinary range of projects.

On a wintery Saturday afternoon two young guys are having a coffee at the Blender Art Café.

Opened in September last year in the Blender Studios building on Spencer St, the café offers a menu of tasty, freshly made items including fresh chicken sandwiches, smoked salmon bagels, toasties, cookies, cakes and a popular “dirty chocolate berry latte”.

It is largely overseen by Pia Suksodsai, the partner of Blender founder Adrian Doyle, who devised the menu.

After finishing their drinks and glancing around at the books, games and art materials available to play with, the guys wander through the rest of the complex, checking out the open plan studios, where artists work in different genres and mediums, and chatting with a few who are hanging out there.

This is the idea behind the café, Doyle says – to “bring the community in” with good food and coffee and “super-friendly” service, engaging their curiosity in the adjoining gallery and other projects.

A lot of people don't know what's going on in the big grey former pub on Spencer St, he says, and faces are often seen peering in through the windows.

While the café “creates an engagement” with the outside world Blender hasn’t had before, so far the model is only partly working, with the café during the week essentially functioning as a separate entity.

It is also challenging to run, Doyle says, because the studios have so many other projects.

One thing immediately clear about the white-coated artist is that he is not shy of a project.

“If you don't take risks, then you're celebrating mediocrity,” he tells North West City News.

“I think sometimes it's better to lose and at least to have tried than to not try and always wonder.”

It has been 25 years since Doyle set up his “collaborative studio space for artists” which is also “a base for a range of collective art endeavours”.

In addition to Blender’s uncommonly affordable 20-odd artist spaces, its Dark Horse Experiment “research gallery” and new café, he and Pia run “production leg” Blender Creative, which provides murals, installations and other public work for clients ranging from suburban councils to swank hotels.

They also organise urban and street art tours, led by Blender artists, and school workshops covering skateboard spray-paint art, freehand painting and working with stencils.

A popular recent initiative is the “paint lab”, a colourful chaotic “splash room”, where groups of up to 15 people put on protective clothing and get in front of an easel to try their hand at creative work, taking away the results on a canvas afterwards.

The sessions attract a diverse range of people, including school kids, couples on dates, multi-generational family groups and a surprising number of people with disabilities – something new for the studios which Doyle likes a lot.

Generally, “they leave with a big smile on their face” and often “stop and sit in the cafe, and all of a sudden they're playing Uno,” he says.

The paint room activity, like many of Blender’s other activities, helps pay the rent on the big inner-city building, which recently went up $1200 a month.

When he set up Blender Studios in 2001 Doyle was on the dole and it was a month-by-month proposition, he says.

“We just managed to pull it off.”

It was fortunate he was able to stay in the relatively cheap Franklin St space for 17 years.

“Because of property prices it's nearly impossible for places like Blender to exist anymore,” Doyle says.

In any case, the frenetic activity seems to inspire the 48-year-old, who along the way has found time to complete a PhD on the role Blender Studios has played at “the intersection of street art and fine art” and still makes and shows his own work.

“The more things that are happening here, the cooler it is,” he says.

“Sometimes the studios can have three paint workshops in a day, this place is packed.

“There's the school holiday projects going on, there's an artist in residency upstairs, we get international artists come through. There's like a million things happening at once, and it's just so exciting.

“I love it when it's crazy busy.”

On the day North West City News visits, Doyle has just hours earlier arrived back from Thailand, where he is building a gallery on the Malay peninsula, where Pia has family.

The next phase of their creative lives, and of Blender’s, is something of a work in progress, he acknowledges.

But that’s ok for an artist whose philosophy includes a commitment to not repeating himself.

“Everything’s changing,” Doyle says. “We don't quite know how it's all going to pan out.

“But we’ve just got to throw shit into the wind.”

Blender Art Café is at Blender Studios at 400 Spencer St, West Melbourne.

For more information: theblenderstudios.com •