Alveridge Animated

The rights to Queenstown artist Ivan Clarke’s Lonely Dog picture book — “a series of paintings featuring a lonesome-looking pooch” and his friends in the mythical world of Alveridge — has been bought by Warner Brothers. Clarke’s Lonely Dog paintings caught the attention of Weta’s Richard Taylor, who helped Clarke create a mythology for the characters and produced 95 editions of an oversized art book, The Almalogue, featuring the lonesome canine, priced for about $6,000 each. Clarke was unwilling to discuss figures but said the sale of the rights would allow him to buy a new set of paintbrushes. “I’ve always said this project … and character and story … will never go away, and we’re seeing that more and more with the calibre of interest it’s attracted along the way. So, at some point, you start genuinely believing in it,” Clarke said. Clarke is renowned for his New Zealand ‘Grande Scale’ landscape painting.