In Tom’s Shadow

Watercolour paintings from various projects in Queensland and New South Wales.
Of all the paintings that Tom Roberts created in his career, he is perhaps best known for his large scale allegorical works “Shearing the Rams” and “The Golden Fleece”. People from beyond the art world, and beyond the sheep and wool industries, know these two paintings. It’s like he started the genre of shed paintings (and reached its pinnacle all in the same breath). When I say I make artwork about shearing sheds, the usual response is “oh, like Tom Roberts…” I’ve spent 30 years learning how to come out from his shadow to carve my own place within this genre.

I painted my first shearing shed in 1984. Since then I’ve painted nearly 100 different sheds from Tasmania to Mt Isa. It’s the mainstay of my practice. When I visit a property, I’m mainly interested in the shearing shed. I love the iconic nature of the building and the inherent beauty of the architecture. I love the how it’s an exercise in abstract shapes and line.

However it becomes a more complete story of the property when I make artwork about the other buildings there too. I’ve painted also– and not in any order of importance – hayshed, dairy, ram shed, bowsers, tobacco barn, meathouse, sawmill, tack room, museum shed, machinery shed, tractor shed, cat shed (for the caterpillar) car shed, barn, toolshed, pumpshed, blacksmith’s shop, stables.

This collection of paintings talks of the diversity of purpose-built architecture found across rural Australia. It’s about how each place has it’s own regional elements, and each its own individuality.

It’s important for me that there is integrity of place – that it looks like it is.

I meet people from the cities or coastal fringes and hear their mis-information and mis-understandings about agriculture and grazing. It is a gradual and inevitable amnesia that describes the true balance of power in a country that still needs to feed itself. This work is not deliberately nostalgic. It’s about real people, real places. It’s about how, despite those lifestyles being trivialised by mass media and hijacked by tourism, for so many Australians this is still home.