On the Home Run

On the Home Run Original Oil on Board 30.5cm x 25cm

School kids all racing each other to get home first, no price, just bragging rights.  Kids all over Australia are much the same and enjoy the same things, and when you home from class even a class of 5 kids, its exciting news to be shared with Mum.  Woop Woop is Australian slang for the middle of nowhere. But plenty of school-aged children are living there, in the outback, whether on family cattle stations or in remote indigenous communities. Many kids learn at School of the Air but even these kids have an opportunity every month or so to go to a school in town.  So, they’ve got kids their age they can play with, interact with, and learn things like how to share and a few rules, simple things.  “Things like sitting on the floor, for our little students, that’s a completely new experience to sit on the floor and listen to a book being read.”  There are no real challenges in teaching students who are usually so isolated.  “They’re all really nice kids and easy to get along with. You don’t have to reprimand them, they’re very grown up, a lot of them.  “A lot of them have a lot of responsibility at home, they’re quite grown up.”

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