You almost never see a koala move. That is the whole problem with drawing one. A red-tailed black cockatoo announces itself from three paddocks away and dares you to keep working. A koala just sits in the fork of a gum, grey on grey, and waits for you to give up and go home. Most of the time you walk underneath one and never know it was there.
They are also hard for a reason that has nothing to do with patience. A koala is a round animal with almost no edges, and ink has only two settings, black or the white of the paper. Roundness is the hardest thing there is to fake with a brush. Put too much line in and you have drawn a teddy bear. Put too little and you have a grey smudge in a tree. The fur does not rescue you either. Koala fur is dense and flat, more like felt than fluff, so all the tricks that work on an owl are useless here.
Take Baby On Board home, $310
Black frame or unframed for international, same price. Framed here in the studio.
This one is mostly empty paper and I want to be honest about that, because people sometimes expect more lines for their money. The two of them are held together by about a dozen strokes and a scatter of ink underneath. Everything I left out is doing as much work as the marks I kept. A baby koala rides high on its mother’s back with its whole weight tipped forward, and if you draw every hair you lose that. You have to draw the lean instead.
I redrew the mother’s shoulder four times. Three of them were better drawings of a shoulder. All three were worse at carrying a baby.
On 12 February 2022 the koala was listed as endangered under the national environment law across Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT. It had been sitting at vulnerable since 2012. Habitat clearing, disease, drought, and then the 2019 and 2020 fires finished the argument.
Nothing about the animal changed that morning. A koala in a gum tree at King Scrub did not wake up rarer than it was the day before. What changed was the paperwork, and what the paperwork does is make you look at your own back catalogue differently.
I did not set out to draw endangered animals. I drew things I liked looking at. Some of them have quietly become the other thing while I was working, and now there is a whole drawer of them.
That is the one where I stopped fighting the shape. Mother curled right around the baby until the pair of them make a single circle, and the whole drawing sits inside that one form. It went out the door and I have not managed it again since.
I am not pretending it is available, because it is not. I include it because the question I get asked most is whether there will be another one like it. Sometimes. Not on demand, and not on a schedule. These are drawn one at a time from an animal that has to be in the mood to be looked at, and when one sells, that particular afternoon goes with it. There is no second copy in a drawer, and there is no print run in a warehouse.
If you would rather not leave it to chance, a commission is the honest answer. You tell me the animal, I draw it once, and then it is yours and nobody else’s.
The koalas are not the only ones in that drawer. Two others are still here, and neither of them is Australian, which I think is the point.
This is the cheapest original in the whole endangered group and it is the one I would take off the wall last. The arms are almost a single unbroken stroke. I have tried to repeat that stroke perhaps twenty times since and it has never once come out.
See Forest Hugs, from $159
Unframed $159. Black or white frame $210.
An elephant coming towards you is nearly all foreshortening, so there is very little animal to draw and a great deal of judgement about where to stop. The ears carry it. Everything behind the ears is suggestion.
See Gentle at Heart, $210
Black frame or unframed, same price.
Every one of these is drawn by hand in Dayboro, Queensland, and framed here before it goes anywhere. I work almost entirely in black and white because colour lets you off. A colour photograph of a koala tells you what it looked like. Ink makes you decide what it was doing, and with a koala that decision is the entire drawing.
You can read more about how I got here if you like, or go straight to the Australian wildlife work, which is where most of the birds live.
On the wall right now
Baby On Board, two koalas in loose ink line. $310.
Forest Hugs, an orangutan and a child in brush and ink. From $159.
Gentle at Heart, an elephant walking out of the page. $210.
There is a koala somewhere up the ridge behind the studio that I have been told about twice and have never once found. I keep the sketchbook in the car anyway.
They come through the gums before a storm and the whole paddock hears them first. Four birds, one flash of red, and the hardest thing I have ever tried to put down in ink.
Six weeks, four countries, one full camera. The gate at Charles de Gaulle, a plane pointed at Istanbul, and the long hop home to the studio. Last post from the road.
Monday’s list said one word: Sennelier. The paint shop on the quay that has been serving artists since 1887. On the way there the Left Bank gave me green glass bubbles, a wall of steel cyclists, and an entire film crew in the Palais-Royal.
