At the beginning of this month my gran passed away.
I will always remember her as such a strong, hard working woman who along with my grandfather, spent the majority of their lives working on their farm on the north coast of Kangaroo Island.
During my last few years of high school in the early 90’s I would find myself boarded onto a tiny 19 seat plane (I vividly remember sitting directly behind the pilot and watching over his shoulder as he skimmed over sheep fences in to land at Pennashaw airfield to grab the mail before continuing on to Kingscote), bound for my Grandfathers farm to be put to work for the summer.
It was hard work – baling hay, crutching sheep, carting hay etc. – and I remember being sore, sun burnt and exhausted most of the time, but to see my 70 year old grandparents doing it all without breaking a sweat soon put it all into perspective. I remember fondly the time driving a ute full of sheep out to a remote paddock with only myself and the trusty sheep dog (sitting in the front seat – convinced she was one of the humans) on loose dirt roads, well before I had a licence to drive.
I remember driving an old flat top truck that I could barely reach the pedals of, laden with that much hay that it would have reached at least twice as high as the truck itself, towing the hay bale loader along behind, and seeing my grandfather wincing in pain as I crunched the hell out of the gear box trying to find first while he held the paddock gate open for me. These are all cherished memories.
They sold the family farm at few years later and retired to Victor Harbor. My grandfather passed away from an aggressive cancer 2004.
At my grandmothers funeral, a slideshow was projected onto the church wall and one particular image brought these memories flooding back. It was such a strong image and absolutely personified everything about these two wonderful people.
I went home and took out a charcoal set that my sister had given me as a Christmas present some years earlier and began to draw.
This piece of art was the result. I not only felt happy to have captured their essence, but felt enlivened with the realisation that I was capable of creating art, with this picture marking the point at which I could look back upon as the inception of my foray into my life as an artist.
