Art

In the process, he unwound in a hammock, read books and surfed at the crack of dawn. He also stumbled across a new career that is everything he’d dreamt work to be: fulfilling, engaging, liberating and true.

When Chris – a furniture designer by trade and a surfie at heart – left Brisbane for the Sunshine Coast in 2001, he didn’t know that within five years he would work as an artist full-time and sell his paintings through Buderim’s much-loved Art Nuvo Gallery. He would also win many local art prizes, including the 2009 People’s Choice award for the Combined Rotary Spectacular. 

Until 2001, Chris was designing and selling custom-made furniture in Brisbane and the only pointers he had for his new-found career were A-grade marks from his high school art class days.

He explains the impetus behind the big move, “I just wasn’t satisfied with my job… I had a house up here [at Kawana] and I thought I’d save up enough money to have six months off and surf and try new things, and one of those was to pick up a paintbrush and try painting. The idea was to take a step back and have a good hard look at my life.”

Chris says the decision to radically change his career was definitely right.

“I was ready to go,” says Chris, referring to his furniture job. “I should have gone a year before. It took me two months of just lying around in a hammock and reading and surfing – I think I even made a surfboard – it took that long to unwind.”

Once he started to feel like himself again, Chris explored his interests in kayaking and painting, while working odd jobs such as labouring to pay his mortgage and make ends meet. He enrolled in art classes with the Sunshine Coast Art Group and followed his friend’s suggestion to learn technique from renowned Noosa artist, Bill McKay.

“Bill was fantastic,” Chris says eagerly. “I still rely on him every now and then as a mentor for advice and direction in where I am heading.”

It’s little wonder Chris looks to Bill for inspiration for his seascapes as the two share a love of the ocean – Chris has been surfing for the past 28 years and Bill retired as a master mariner to settle in Noosa in 1991. Chris says his roots are on the coast.

“I’m surrounded by the ocean and always have been. I paint what I’m interested in and it gives me a feeling of being at the beach or in the ocean.”

Chris describes his seascapes and landscapes as “verging on figurative realism with a twist in the end”, and it is clear he has an innate talent for precise techniques that capture scenes in their pristine yet almost surreal form. He captures iconic Sunshine Coast landscapes that also happen to be his favourite surf haunts, anywhere from Caloundra to Double Island Point and across to Fraser Island.

“Because I surf I’m always up before the sun is up,” Chris says. “I’m forever in and out of the dunes as the sun is rising. That’s the time it’s most surreal; when there’s no one else around.”

But Chris says his main source of inspiration comes from “straight out the front”, that is, down a little 100-metre bush track that leads from his house to Kawana Beach.

“I have my own funky timber park bench down there that just happened to arrive on the dunes on my birthday.”

This is code for Chris’s close, thoughtful friends who dreamt up the perfect present for their favourite sea-gazing artist.

“The other day I found myself lying on the bench just listening to the ocean. A huge volume of my paintings come out of that area,” he says.

Aside from the lazing and listening phase, Chris explains he makes little sketches and takes reference photos at the beach before heading home to tackle the next canvas.

“For clarification, I’ll walk down to the beach again and think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how the tree is getting the different shadow’.”

Chris’s office is his home garage. His favourite painting days involve swinging open his garage door and letting the sunlight flood in while local band OKA’s signature fusion of dub, reggae and jazz hums from the stereo.

As he speaks, Chris is diligently working towards a solo exhibition at Art Nuvo Gallery in September and is enjoying the pressure of a deadline.

“As I work towards this exhibition, I can start some days at 7am and finish at 6pm. And they are great days; I go ahead by miles. But I still have that luxury that if it doesn’t feel right, I’ll forget about it and not force it.”

He is fortunate to have many close friends living nearby; they often pop in for a cup of tea or a surf break. This is one way Chris says he avoids the feeling of isolation that can be a career hazard.

Chris is thrilled to have been working full-time as an artist for the past two years, even though he admits the concept is quite scary at times, “…because I have a mortgage like everyone else, and bills to pay”. But the new-found career direction is a dream come true because he says he never truly knew what he wanted to do with his life. 

As Chris attempts to describe just how much he appreciates the beautiful harmony between his career and lifestyle, he references a Michael Leunig poem, True Happiness.

“It suggests that how a man can measure his own happiness is by going to the cupboard, taking out all his neckties and laying them end to end. He must measure the length and that distance is exactly the same as his distance from true happiness. To me, rather than happiness, it’s a gauge of lifestyle. I checked the other day, I have only two left, and one of those is an old ’70s number from a bucks’ night. My measurement may therefore be a little skewed.”