Nicola Gower-Wallis

I just went to see this show at Bett Gallery, tremendous.

The most beautiful cows in Premaydena

The Night Shift

Recent animations

 

Dream Burnie by Justin Heazlewood

Justin Heazlewood and I have a bit in common. It's tempting to make more of this than there really is; because he's talented, witty, poetic, musical, courageous, quite successful and he is really rowing his own boat, artistically. 

The similarities? We're both from Burnie. I also enjoy writing, I am an artist, and I also did not know what a souvlaki was until I left Burnie. 

The differences are;

• I am twelve years older
• I do not have the degree of drive or courage to be original and fully myself that Justin has
• I grew up with two parents who had it together; he was caring for his single mum who had schizophrenia.
• and I went to Burnie Primary/Burnie High while he was Montello Primary/Parklands High. Primaries in Burnie were pretty much similar I reckon but PHS was a much tougher proposition than BHS. I bumped along without ever working anything much out at high school while I feel that across town you had to have a strategy to survive those four years.

If you don't know anything about Burnie it's an industrial town and port on the north west coast of Burnie. It's surrounded by dairy farms and forestry. Burnie's full-employment commodity-exporting days are in the past now, and it is trying to survive on tourism, like everywhere. But… I am not an expert on 2025 Burnie at all. I lived there for 18 years until moving to Hobart for uni in 1986.

I first became aware of Justin around 2005 as a muso and personality on Triple J called The Bedroom Philosopher. He was witty and sophisticated, but employed a genuine understanding of his (our) daggy regional background which he deployed as both a weapon and a shield. I subscribed to his email newsletter and over the years we've corresponded just a bit.

Justin has now written a book called Dream Burnie which is really a physical souvenir of a whole Dream Burnie project. I would describe it as a thorough excavation of the surprising artistic life of Burnie and it's people over the last several decades. 

You can buy a copy here

There are about 30 interviews here with people who grew up or worked in Burnie or were even inspired by Burnie to create art, music, games, films, animations, sculpture and indescribable hybrids of same. There's an anthology of Justin's own work in here. And a scrapbook of great Burnie ephemera that captures that time at the Dawn of Desktop Publishing.

I have only dipped into it until this week (my sister Sally and her husband Matt are featured subjects so I started there). But now I am reading it front to back and it's taken my breath away a couple of times. Nostalgia is a corrosive drug etc yadda yadda but I think a lot of what’s in here should resonate with anyone who feels like the time and place they're in is stifling their voice or clipping their wings.

What Justin demonstrates through his careful sifting of these stories is that our DUMB TOWN, our PAPER MILL PAINT FACTORY WOODCHIP PILE 7BU FOOTBALL town, was and is full of creative and original young thinkers, who could have connected, and sometimes did, to feel like they weren't alone.

There was the Coastal Art Group and rock bands and brass bands and the Musical Society and the Jazz Club and so on – I'm not saying it was a cultural desert. Like Sally, I went to art school in Hobart and so did a dozen of my contemporaries from Burnie and the coast. But it's honestly surprising to me to see the talent and really the word I keep thinking is courage of so many souls who sprang from the chocolatey brown soil of this town. The art pedigree of the joint outdoes the football pedigree to be honest.

If you are Tasmanian you will have likely encountered the Dream Burnie roadshow by now. He's been pretty brash and he's not just quietly hoping the books sell themselves. I may have thought "Come on mate give it a rest" once or twice. But it's a bloody good book, I am very glad to have got my hands on one and I might even write a part 2 to this rave review rave once I have read it entirely.

Now I have to drop him a line and ask if he pinched my Cooee Cordials logo artwork because I am pretty sure he did.

Birchip, Victoria

I have never been to Birchip, Victoria, but I have flown over it in my mind thanks to the satellites; and this is what I saw and heard.

• Watercolour paintings 70x70mm
• Animation added in Adobe AfterEffects 
• Sound elements from the incredible free archive at freesound.org 
• 405240__guyburns__small-town-5.mp3
• 649815__fran-freesound__fran_lamp_car_approaches_dirt_road.wav
• 156828__the_yura__small-tractor.wav
• 231303__metalman101__cockatoo-flyby-01.wav 
• 636863__alex_hears_things__early-morning-birds.wav 
• License: Creative Commons 0

Little paintings from the last 12 months

 I've been doing these for the 18 months or so. I posted some around this time last year. and then there's these I did in Hong Kong and this one which I animated.

This load are mostly around Hobart but a couple from further afield.

I work on a 7cm square, occasionally I go double width. I love how they look when I scan them and zoom in; they come up looking loose because they are painted so small.

Top of Liverpool St

Warwick St Driveway

Mt Pleasant Oval at Pawtella

Domain from Audley St North Hobart

City Hall

Devonshire Square

Devonshire Square sketch

Amy Street, Burnie

Milles Street, South Hobart

Corner Melville and Murray St

Goal Umpire, Last Quarter at Kempton Oval

Bottom of Lynton Avenue

Top of Lynton Avenue

Looking East, Cascade Paddock

Looking West, Cascade Paddock

Patrick St from St Andrews Park

Top of Bathurst St

The Rivulet at Harrington St

Caversham Court, Elizabeth Bay

Port Road at Boat Harbour

Federal St Corner, North Hobart

Small Hong Kong paintings

Above: Victoria Peak looking north to Kowloon
Below: Castle Road, Mid-Levels

Below: Part of the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Museum

Boa Vista Road

This is Boa Vista Road in New Town, five minutes drive from the centre of town. 

I catch a bus up this way in my lunch hour sometimes and walk back into the city. The bushy hill is the Queens Domain. This road corkscrews up, over, down and around to the right to meet Park Street. A few metres beyond Park Street is the busy Brooker Highway. Then above that Cleary's Gates Road runs through the bush (lined with parked commuter cars). And even further up the hill is the jogging loop track.

I like doing these urban landscapes and like most artists I shuffle the cars out of the scene because they spoil it. 

I took these progress pics as I went. The red and blue one is the source for the animation below.

In the finished painting above, an old homestead snoozes in a quiet street with apparently untouched bush in the background - a total lie! I like an uncluttered landscape. But at the same time I really love the way the movement of a car across the surface of the earth can highlight the topography. 

I don't know where I am quite going with these experiments. This may just be too noisy with too much squiggle. My boss years ago said one project coming up "might suit your 'crappy style'" and I've always thought fondly of that. At least I have a style.

A couple more paintings/drawings

So I am continuing to bang out these very small drawings and paintings. I have finally reached a lull in the freelance work (that has been a surprisingly big thing in the last 6 months). So the time is there, and the motivation(s).

1. Gifts for friends. I can slot these into the little 7cm square books I found at Artery, with some ephemera and nonsense.
2. Instagram. I think some of these are nice and they tie in (and are often based on) the photos I post all the time of landscapes and buildings and weird corners. And I love to have a nice Instagram profile to scroll back through but I also enjoy the positive comments which are nice without being too gushy. I don't think I'd ever make a thing of posting art on Twitter or Facebook – which are places for arguing (T) and getting rid of furniture (F).
3. It just feels good to be making art, and this is low-stress, low-cost and very portable. Work is quiet at the moment and because the whole kit takes up hardly any space I can easily squeeze in a bit of a paint at my desk. Living the dream! 

I am trying not to second-guess the whole posting-to-Insta-and-enjoying-approval thing. Whatever gets you making art is good, right?

The wide paintings below are about 130mm x 65mm, designed to be cut in half* or folded and slotted into the little square scrapbooks.

Bowen Rd, Lutana and Mt Direction

Opposite All Saints, South Hobart

Liverpool Street, West Hobart

T&G and SBT buildings from Trafalgar car park

*I can't really imagine now cutting them in half

A nice things about the tiny scale is when you scan/photograph the work and look up close it paradoxically seems quite loose and free, thanks to my shaky hands and being out of practice.

Little watercolours

I walk around the city at lunchtime and in odd moments on weekends, and document that on Instagram here. I take photos of very ordinary things.     I made myself a target of posting a drawing or some sort of art for every fifth post. This was to give myself an incentive to keep drawing, even if they were just small scribbles. And I have tried to ignore quality control; just post whatever is new in the notebook.

I found these tiny 7cm x 7cm blank books at Artery. The paper is very thin but they are fine for micro-scrapbooks so I am doing some drawings and paintings to that size.

Above is the corner of Devonshire Square and Browne St, West Hobart.
Below is the bottom of Warneford Rd, South Hobart where it meets the Hobart Rivulet,
with houses in upper Liverpool St in the background.

Footy art

I have some work in an exhibition in Mildura coming up. I need to write a little spiel about why I "as an artist, love football and football art work". So I am going to write it here.

When I grew up on Tasmania's northwest coast, football was a big part of life. Around 1975 I started swapping football cards at primary school and the world of black and white footy replays was suddenly in colour. I think I gravitated to Richmond because they had the same colours as my hometown Burnie Tigers.
I started doing these design inspired by footy cards in 2012, for t-shirts. Footy is an emotional game and the feelings stirred by seeing your team's guernsey (and others) are strong and complex. I love being able to celebrate an overlooked or under-appreciated player.  Footy art makes public the sporting passion of the artist. It could be a key moment from a big game under a turquoise sky, or a couple of your favourite players in full playing gear dropping in for tea and cake. By its nature footy art appeals to a wide audience - so it brings people together. 

These 5 pieces are all recycled designs. Four are t-shirt designs while Dustin Martin was an illustration for a book project that has been canned.

The illustrations are all done digitally, with some scanned textures overlaid. I haven't used watercolour texture before the book project; I was delighted with how it came up so I have brought some into the backgrounds of Sonny, Maurice and Mitch for these prints. I had them printed on high-quality paper then worked into them with coloured pencil for some extra texture and to lend uniqueness to each print. There is a limited edition of 10 of each; three of each have gone to Mildura.

If anyone is interested in one drop me a line – each print is $65 + postage unframed.

Some other footy artists

Two images above by Kate Birrell

Noel Young

Susan Sutton

Nick Howson