$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.
A rusted tow truck rests in Dayboro scrub, cockatoos and galahs sketched close by in this photo-pencil collage.
The bush has already started taking the truck back. Rust blooms across the bonnet in oranges and browns, the tray sags where the timber has rotted through, and creepers reach up over one wheel arch as though testing whether it still counts as metal or has become part of the ground. Danielle B Latta found this old tow truck sitting exactly like this in the scrub around Dayboro, Queensland, and photographed it before a single mark of ink touched paper.
Watching over the wreck are three native birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos and a galah, rendered not in photograph but in fine pencil, feather by feather, perched on the cab and the bull bar as if they had claimed the truck as a lookout post. The contrast is the point of the piece: soft graphite lines against the harder, colour-treated photography of rusted panels and cracked glass, sketch and camera sitting side by side on the same page.
Selective colour pulls the cockatoos’ yellow crests and the galah’s pink chest forward against a muted, desaturated truck body, so the eye moves between bird and machine rather than settling on either. It is a slow way to build an image. Danielle draws each bird by hand first, working from her own reference photographs taken on walks near home, then layers the pencil work with the treated photograph digitally until the two mediums read as one surface rather than a collage stitched together.
What comes through is less a comment on decay and more a small, quiet joke the bush plays on itself: leave something metal in the scrub long enough and the locals will move in. Scrub Patrol is that moment caught mid-watch, cockatoos and galah on duty, the old truck going nowhere, Dayboro bushland doing what it always does around the edges of things people leave behind.
Scrub Patrol
