It struck me today, in the midst of juggling the viral Alpaca gone mad video thing and emails, images, licencing etc….. that it seems odd that my website is called OutbackArt!
I mean, like, what the hell? Chrome naked ladies against seascape backgrounds, with fish, monkeys, beachballs, Alpaca videos, travel videos………..hu?
I’d better start at the beginning I suppose. You see life wasn’t always this complicated.
I once lived in a little mining town in the middle of the Australian outback, called Broken Hill. Many of you would know Broken Hill, even if you’ve never been there. Think of : Priscilla queen of the desert, wake in fright, razorback, town like Alice (yes Broken Hill was used as a substitute in scenes for Alice Springs) Outback bound, Race the sun etc and of course….Mad Max2.
Now of Mad Max… see when I was a teenager, we went to the movies and saw this cracker of a film with this bloke we’d never heard of called Mel Gibson. I think I saw him in a poncy film called ‘Tim’ but never took much notice.
Fast forward about 8 years and holy schmoly, I find myself living in the same town Mad Max was filmed in. Not only that, a few years later, I found myself as the new tenant of the 110 year old, abandoned Catholic church high on the hill in sunny Silverton! You can’t get closer to Mad Max than that! Many of the car chase scenes, including the final chase with the tanker, were filmed just outside Silverton on the road to the Mund Mundi plains.
Anyhow, I digress. So for the next 6 years, that dusty old church was my studio gallery. Here I produced hundreds of paintings, met hundreds of thousand of people (not exaggerating) and lived and breathed the ‘outback way of life’. Well, after a move into town to a ‘city’ gallery in the main street, a few more years passed and it became apparent that the time was upon us to leave the dustbowl of Broken Hill for greener climes. What more greener than God’s own country in sunny Queensland.
So we upped stumps and hauled ourselves 1800 kms to the Sunshine Coast, where we now reside on a few green leafy acres, with two mad dogs, a heap of wildlife and 9 spoilt Alpacas.
In the midst of all this madness you call life, we would regularly travel overseas. Most often to places you’ve never heard of, nor would ever want to go! Now I would always take a camera with me, then later a video camera too. After nearly two decades of travelling, we have enough photos to bore an entire generation shitless, let alone our poor earbashed photo inundated friends. Hence the photo pages of the site. I can now bore a whole new generation of people in other countries too, completely shitless with my photos!! 🙂
Which brings me to closing…. Hence the photography/ film fetish and the inevitable boredom that sets in… between painting and travelling to places that are hard to find on a map. So…. film Alpacas! I just happened to catch one of the babies (a Cria) napping and filmed it. This sat in the cupboard for 2 years before I dragged out the tape, transcoded it to the computer and last week, threw it together with some music and uploaded it to You Tube.
And here I am…….. better go do some real work now…. Shane