An A-List crowd descended on the foreshores of the Opera House as TAG Heuer welcomed Chris Hemsworth as the new face and global ambassador of the brand. Jumping up onto stage I painted Chris and revealed the new campaign look in gold glitter. What impressed me is that Chris was a customer of TAG HEUER [...]
Time for something a little different. I thought I would tell you about some of the countries I have performed in, what I expected and what I found out.. Just last month I did my first show in Dubai.. Stepping off the plane for my first show in Dubai was somewhat overwhelming. I had forty eight hours to take it all in before performing a show at the five star Dubai Creek Golf Club, a prestigious club that is not too dissimilar to the huge white sails of the Sydney Opera House and also features on their twenty dirhams bank note. This flashy, luxurious, modern city has an air of confidence, if not arrogance about it. It seems hell bent on proving something to the rest of the world. It is a great strategy – why not make everything “the best in the world”, it is the catalyst for driving business and tourism in a location which is hard to believe is still really the harsh desert. The song “Anything you can do, I can do better” comes to mind when I think of Dubai. I am reminded of this when I take the big red bus tour around the city. “…and on our left we have the Burj Khalifa, the largest building in the world. It is approximately 818 metres in height. We say approximately, because we could always improve on the height!” our tour operator says with a chuckle. Last month a building in Hong Kong overtook the Burj Khalifa as the tallest in the world, so expect modifications to the Khalifa to overtake it again, after all, the whole lobby is dedicated to showing you how much taller it is than other buildings. Dubai is almost surreal. I can imagine a giant list that the sheiks put together. Tallest building. Check. Largest shopping mall. Check. Largest indoor ski field. Check. Umm, we like the design of the Chrysler building in America. Check, actually we’ll build two of them side by side. Check. We’ll build massive parks and golf courses and use trillions of gallons of water to keep everything green, so nobody knows we are in the middle of the desert. Check. We’ll build a massive residential area in the shape of a palm tree, actually while we are at it, let’s build a map of the world in islands. Check and check. Now you know, why it is somewhat overwhelming. As for the comparisons between Dubai and Vegas. It’s really chalk and cheese. I was in Vegas a month earlier and whilst I believe it still holds the crown for hustle and bussle, excitement and the outlandish, Dubai is about where luxury has no limits and everything they do is the best, or the biggest, or the most expensive. It really is a city that is sprinkled in gold, which incidentally you can buy in little bars from convenient teller machines around the major tourist attractions. So I survived my forty eight hours before my show in Dubai and my most enjoyable moments were spent wandering the museum and the sand pit areas of old Dubai, bargaining with the locals in the textile, spice and gold souks. However, spending forty bucks to get to the top of the Burj Khalifa, getting lost in the world’s largest shopping centre and seeing all the wonders of this surreal city was also breathtaking. Brad Blaze performed in Dubai for KPMG at the World Golf summit forum. He painted golf legend Jack Nicholas, Elvis Presley and the prestigious Dubai Creek Golf Club, with the final painting now hanging in the prestigious club. […]
