Price range: $210.00 through $310.00
This artwork is on display at LRB Retreat & Private Gallery Experience.
It is not for sale online. You can view and purchase it in person at this location.
A dappled grey horse bows before a weathered Tooraweenah homestead in this framed black and white photograph.
Dust and Good Bones was photographed at Tooraweenah, a small town on the western edge of the Warrumbungles in central New South Wales. A dappled grey horse stands in the yard of an old timber homestead, neck arched low, muzzle almost brushing the dirt. Behind it the corrugated iron roof sags a little at one corner, the weatherboards have given up their paint, and a windmill holds still against a pale sky. There is no movement in the frame, only weight. The horse looks like it has stood there a hundred times before, and the house looks like it has watched a hundred horses do it.
The title comes from the way country people talk about old houses and good horses. A homestead like this one gets described as having good bones, meaning the frame is honest even when the cladding has gone grey. The same words fit the horse. Under the dapples there is a deep chest, a strong hind end, the kind of structure that lasts. Dust is what settles on both of them out here, on the roof and the rails and the coat, and neither seems to mind. The photograph puts the two side by side and lets you decide which one has aged better.
Black and white was the only honest choice for this image. Colour would have softened it into nostalgia. In monochrome the eye goes straight to texture, the grain of the split timber, the ripple of the corrugated iron, the soft gradient of dapples across the horse’s shoulder. The photograph was taken in low angled light so the shadows carve out every board and every rib of the roof, then printed with a full tonal range, from the near white of the mane to the deep black under the eaves.
Tooraweenah is not a place people pass through by accident. It sits off the highway, quiet, with the Warrumbungles on the horizon and paddocks that run out to the tree line. Spend an hour there and you understand why the past feels close, and why a horse dozing in front of a hundred year old house does not look staged. This piece carries some of that quiet with it. Hang it in a hallway, above a desk, or anywhere the light falls softly, and it does not ask for attention. It waits, the way the horse waits, and it rewards the long look.
Dust and Good Bones
This artwork is on display at LRB Retreat & Private Gallery Experience.
It is not for sale online. You can view and purchase it in person at this location.
