Look a Shooting Star – Make A Wish

Look a Shooting Star – Make A Wish Original Oil on Board 30.5cm x 25cm

The town of Toompine is on the Quilpie Thargomindah Road and was surveyed in 1870. The name is believed to derive from the Aboriginal name Thaumpine, meaning leech.  Toompine known as “The pub without a town” is located along the Dowling Track in the Quilpie Shire.  Cobb and Co. once serviced this town with its regular coach schedule. All that remains today from those early pioneering days is the Southwestern Hotel (circa 1893), but don’t let the size fool you, this little Pub has all the charm and charisma that you could only find at an Outback Pub.  Shooting stars look like stars that quickly shoot across the sky, but they are not stars. A shooting star is really a small piece of rock or dust that hits Earth’s atmosphere from space. It moves so fast that it heats up and glows as it moves through the atmosphere. Shooting stars are what astronomers call meteors. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere before they reach the ground. However, occasionally a meteor is large enough than some of it survives and reaches Earth’s surface. Then it is called a meteorite.

Max is an Australian artist schooled out in the bush among the colourful characters he now paints. His vivid paintings are possible because he “knows” every character he paints he has worked, laughed, cried, and sweated with them all. This knowledge and love of his subjects produces pieces that are so “human” that each piece has its own personality.  Every painting has a story, but Max is a painter of “yarns”, Australian vernacular for a story with a moral and a laugh.  The experiences of those years Max spent in the outback; the memories of growing up in a small country town have provided Max with an endless flow of inspiration for his paintings. His works depict life in the outback as it was then, in a light-hearted vein keen insight and gentle humour that so keenly illustrates country Australians.  A scrawny dog, a drover’s dog, which is almost Max’s unofficial signature

Original Oil on Board by Max Mannix