Richard Wastell: Fishing, painting
I can't say with any certainty where my paintings come from or what they mean. They appear gradually over many months like slowly unfolding dreams. And like dreams their meanings are only ever hinted at. For all that, I'm sure these paintings have something to do with my growing up on the South East coast of Tasmania and the way that particular landscape shaped me in to the painter I am. Our family home was at Seven Mile Beach, an old shack town a half-hour drive out of Hobart. We moved there in1978. It was a good place to grow up and I'm happy that I did. What was good was that walking on the beach, swimming, fishing, surfing, diving for shellfish and having a cook-up on the rocks was just a normal, daily part of our lives. We didn't have to wait for the summer holidays like most other kids we knew. We had the run of the place all year-round. It was our home and our freedom.
A few years ago my mum and her husband bought a beach shack on the Tasmanian Peninsula for their extended families to use. Needless to say I've been happily catching up with the coast life I knew and loved as a kid and sharing that with my own young family. Somethings have changed since childhood though and some for the worse; you can't catch a feed of Flathead anymore, they've been overfished and are now protected. And a big industrial Salmon farm looms darkly on the horizon. But, all is not lost. We can still manage a feed of Abalone and the odd Crayfish off the rocks, spear a mullet and flounder for dinner and have a cook-up on the open fire. In this crazy, messed up world that's a good deal more than most. It's out of all this that my paintings slowly appear.
- Richard Wastell, 2024
Richard Wastell’s enigmatic works render the Tasmanian landscape with such veracity that they are almost otherworldly. He has earned his reputation as a master of composition for large works, across multiple panels, in which elements of interest and admiration are pulled forward for artistic study. These magnified details—insects, shells, lichens, the patterned bark of tree trunks, the soft spines of a cushion plant—give Wastell’s works a uniquely exaggerated first-person perspective. The artist places us where he has stood; we are irrevocably embedded in his reality, enveloped in his deep reverence for the bush.
Perspective is as much a conceptual concern as it is a formal technique for the artist, whose love of painting is paralleled only by his love for the wilderness. The works are as complex and multifaceted as any act of looking, watching, witnessing. There is a deep and dark lament in the scorching of tree ferns after the clear-felling. There is burning joy in the sun that sets the grasslands ablaze at dusk. And there is a stillness and a deep satisfaction in the rippling lakes, the smouldering campfires and the fresh-caught trout in the falling darkness of late summer.
Born in Hobart in 1974, Richard was awarded an honours degree in painting from the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania in 1996. He was the recipient of a three month Arts Tasmania Wilderness Residency at Cradle Mountain/Lake St. Clair National Park in 1997 and soon afterwards began exhibiting with Bett Gallery Hobart, where he continues to be represented today. Richard has held 13 solo exhibitions in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney since 1998 and was commissioned by Devonport Regional Gallery to produce a solo exhibition in 2005.
Richard has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout Australia, some of which have toured internationally. In 2013 Richard was one of ten artists invited to be part of ‘The Skullbone Experiment’ a touring exhibition and ABC documentary film arising out of an artist’s camp at Skullbone Plains, in Tasmania’s Central Highlands, hosted by the Tasmanian Land Conservancy. His work is held by many public and private collections in Australia including Parliament House, Canberra, Macquarie Bank, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Devonport Regional Gallery, Burnie Regional Gallery, Janet Holmes a Court Collection, RACV, Westmead Childrens Hospital and Artbank. Richard lives and works at Prince of Wales Bay, Derwent Park, Glenorchy, with artist Rosemary O’Rourke and their two children, James and Sarah.
-
Richard WastellTravelling home. East Coast garden, 2024oil and pumice on linen137 x 122 cm (stretcher size)Sold -
Richard WastellWe dive for abalone and crayfish, 2024oil and pumice on linen137 x 122 cm (stretcher size)Sold
-
Richard WastellSurf's up. Schouten Island from Shelly Point camp, 2024oil and pumice on linen137 x 122 cm (stretcher size)Sold
-
Richard WastellMuttonfish dream, 2024oil and pumice on linen96 x 112 cm (stretcher size)Sold
-
Richard WastellWaiting for the flounder to come in, 2024oil and pumice on linen112 x 92 cm (stretcher size)Sold
-
Richard WastellThe She-oak pod. Origin of the world, 2024oil and pumice on linen112 x 92 cm (stretcher size)AU$ 11,200.00
-
Richard WastellFlathead and scallops, 2024oil and pumice on linen112 x 92 cm (stretcher size)Sold
-
Richard WastellTimes shelter, 2024oil and pumice on linen92 x 92 cm (stretcher size)Sold
-
Richard WastellAll the good things, 2024oil and pumice on acrylic ground and linen91 x 91 cmSold
-
Richard WastellMy happiness. Pink algae painting, 2024oil and pumice on linen51 x 46 cm (stretcher size)AU$ 5,200.00
-
Richard WastellMy happiness. Red-gold algae painting, 2024oil and pumice on linen40 x 36 cm (stretcher size)AU$ 4,200.00
-
Richard WastellMy happiness. Green-gold algae painting, 2024oil and pumice on linen40 x 36 cm (stretcher size)AU$ 4,200.00
