Tom Carment

There are rooms in our house where I store tools, timber and pictures and where I look at what I’ve painted, but my real studio is in two backpacks – a green canvas one for my watercolours and a grey webbing one for my oils. A few months ago, I considered calling my upcoming exhibition ‘Opal Card Paintings’ because so many of my painting destinations were reached carrying one of these backpacks on public transport. It focuses me, being in a neutral space, away from home, gliding through the landscape, past the houses, shops, backyards and factories, on a bus or train. I didn’t however want the authorities to think that I maybe I’d worked more than 20 hours allowable for holders of the Seniors Opal Card, so I decided a shopping list of what I’ve painted was a better title: ‘Bathers, Bushland, Houses, Fruit and Veg’. ‘People will know what they’re getting,’ I thought. Half of my motifs had indeed been reached by car, on camping trips alone or on journeys to visit family and friends, and the still lifes were painted on the floor at home. At one point I considered the title ‘Clovoomba’, seeing as a lot of pictures were painted in Clovelly and Katoomba, but my loved ones dissuaded me from that idea.

I can’t clearly say why I paint the things I do, but often there’s a personal association or story linked to the motif or place I choose, or some quality about the light that I feel a need to get down, to interpret. I read somewhere that the goal of a landscape painter is to make the viewer feel what you felt when you were there.

On my 70th birthday last September, I took the train to Cowan with Jan and our middle son, Fenn. We packed cheese and tomato sandwiches and carrot sticks and walked from the station along the bush track towards Berowra Waters. We stopped after four kilometres and sat on a rock for our picnic, surrounded by purple and white wildflowers, gem-like in their random sparseness. For me, it was a perfect birthday. As we walked back to the station in the afternoon, I noticed some long tree shadows snaking across grey rocks and the sandy track. Three days later, by myself, I took the 2 pm train back to Cowan and painted them.