Close up on suburbia

Today we made it to the Fremantle Arts Centre and finally took in Shaun Tan's Suburban Odyssey. It was well worth the trip. There was a selection of his suburban paintings and drawings on show. The drawings show some of his method of working when brainstorming ideas for his stories. Up close there is a lot of detail that is not obvious when viewing images of his paintings. Some of his paintings had plaster on board, building up texture  and often combined with a collage type layering of canvas or angular layers of card giving extra depth to the buildings in his suburban street scenes. This was evident in Crows Fighting Behind a Supermarket, 1998. An image of this painting is on my previous blog - Odyssey to suburbia. The foreground had texture from the plaster and the buildings were layered up on top of each other. Totally unexpected and very effective, adding to the sense of crowded space.

I loved the triptych Dormitory Suburb, oil on board, 2001. Two large dark panels with a brighter smaller glimpse of suburbia in the middle with a weird structure foregrounded - shades of his weird and wonderful creatures in his illustrated stories. Endgame, a diptych shows the suburbs, the ubiquitous crows in the foreground, and roads curving out of sight. The second panel, not illustrated has a little window with wooden spars of a ship covered with birds up in the top corner - an example of the bizarre and unexpected delights that Tan is so well known for.

End Game, 1998, main panel

Some sections of his paintings had layers of transparent paint giving enormous depth and complexity to the colours, especially in the darker sections. This contrasted with the richer textures and colour with squiggles and sketchy lines - found in the more organic sections like the trees blowing in the wind. The foreground in his work North Beach had wild seaweedy texture to burn in rich ochres contrasting beautifully with the inky depths of the ocean. The seawall is beautifully rendered with textural plaster and paint. My notes from the exhibition say - texture, texture,texture.

North Beach, 1998

His paintings have a surreal quality to them, forcing a double take on how suburbia is viewed. I love his quirky Cloud painting up high directly on the wall, shown below.

Cloud, 2012, oil on wall

 Needless to say I loved his work. If you get the chance - go see it.