$79.00
This artwork is on display at Dayboro Art Gallery.
It is not for sale online. You can view and purchase it in person at this location.
An Ibis and Cockatoo claim a rusted car in the Dayboro bush, while a Tawny Frogmouth melts into the gums behind them.
A rusted car sits half swallowed by lantana and long grass on the edge of the Dayboro bush, the kind of wreck you find down a back track and forget about until something living moves back in. In Bush Club House, an Ibis stands sentry at the bonnet and a Cockatoo has claimed the open door, both picked out in full colour against a black and white bush behind them. The effect is deliberate. Everything that still breathes gets colour. Everything that is just backdrop, the gum trunks, the grass, the sky, stays in ink and shadow, so the eye settles on the birds before it settles on the wreck itself.
Look longer and a third bird appears. A Tawny Frogmouth sits in the gums behind the car, rendered in the same monochrome as the trees around it, easy to miss on a first pass because that is exactly how a frogmouth survives. It freezes, it blends, it disappears into bark and branch, and most people walk past one on a fence post without ever knowing it is there. Placing it in greyscale rather than colour was the only honest way to draw a bird whose entire strategy is not being seen.
The piece is built from fine ink linework over a photographic rust texture, the car’s panels and peeling paint drawn from the actual surface of an abandoned vehicle rather than invented from memory. That layering, hand drawn line over photographic decay, is what gives the metal its weight and the bush its damp, textured hush. Selective colour was then worked back into the Ibis and Cockatoo so the two live birds read as the true subject, with the frogmouth and the wreck as the quiet story running underneath. The contrast between crisp linework and the soft grain of the rust photograph is where most of the artwork’s texture lives, and it rewards a slow look rather than a quick one.
There is a small joke in the title. A club house is somewhere you claim as your own and defend from everyone else, and that is precisely what these birds have done with a piece of machinery nobody else wants any more. Dayboro’s bush has a way of doing this, reclaiming sheds, cars, fence lines and forgotten paddocks one bird, one vine, one season at a time. Bush Club House is a small record of that habit, a reminder that nothing left out here stays untouched by wildlife for long, drawn one line at a time.
Bush Club House – Tawny Frogmouth, Ibis and Cockatoo
This artwork is on display at Dayboro Art Gallery.
It is not for sale online. You can view and purchase it in person at this location.
