$79.00
1 in stock (can be backordered)
Certificate of Authenticity Included
Every original artwork ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity confirming title, medium, dimensions, and artist provenance. Created with archival-quality pigment ink on acid-free paper.
Rusted car wrecks rest in Dayboro bushland, watched over by an inked Kingfisher and a lanky illustrated Cockatoo.
Bush Lookout begins with a photograph rather than a blank page. The base image is a black and white record of a patch of Dayboro bushland, the kind of place where old cars go to finish their working lives. A sedan sits with its duco flaked into rust freckles, and further along a ute has settled so deep into the grass that its wheels have all but disappeared. Nothing in the photograph has been staged. The wrecks were found exactly as they are, quiet and half swallowed by the bush around them. The scene reads like something driven past a hundred times without a second glance, then finally stopped for.
Onto this weathered scene, a Kingfisher and a Cockatoo have been drawn in fine, hand worked line art. The Kingfisher sits low on the sedan’s roof, wings tucked, its head turned as though something in the undergrowth has caught its attention. The Cockatoo stands apart near the ute, tall and a little gangly on its legs, crest half raised. Both birds are illustrated rather than photographed, which gives them a lighter, more storybook presence against the heavier tones of the rusted metal beneath them.
The strength of the piece sits in that contrast. Photography carries the actual weight of decay, the texture of rust, the specific slump of a bumper bar, while the drawn animals bring movement and personality into a scene that would otherwise sit still. It is an honest kind of collage, with no attempt to hide where the photograph ends and the ink begins. Nothing about the wreck yard has been prettied up for the artwork. Instead the birds are simply placed into it, unbothered by the machinery rotting around them, because in Dayboro’s bush that is exactly how it works. The land takes back what people leave behind, and the wildlife carries on regardless.
Bush Lookout sits within Running Duck Studio’s Australian Wildlife collection, where native birds are given room to behave like locals rather than subjects. This piece asks for a slower look. Once the eye adjusts to the black and white base, the ink work on the Kingfisher and Cockatoo starts to carry the whole composition, turning a forgotten car graveyard into a small, watched over corner of the bush.
Bush Lookout – Kingfisher & Cockatoo
