SHAUN TAN Suburban Odysseus

SHAUN TAN

Suburban Odysseus

Shaun Tan’s new exhibition, Suburban Odyssey, opens at the Fremantle Arts Centre on Friday, May 18, and is on display ’til Sunday, July 15.

It’s very hard to fit Perth-raised artist Shaun Tan into a neat little box. ‘Illustrator’ seems like a useful enough label, but it ignores every other field at which he’s turned his hand - and there are many.
    “I often stumble when people ask me what I do for a living,” Tan tells us. “A bit of painting, writing, film things, and interested in ‘Fine Art’ as much as comics, children’s books, science fiction, and lots more. I often end up sounding like I’m still making up my mind - or unemployed and just pottering around at home. But if I had to pick, I’d just call myself an artist, since every other activity has developed from a lifelong love of painting and drawing. If I had nothing else on my table, I would just go out with a box of oil paints and little wooden panels, painting impressionistic landscapes all day, something I started doing in my late teens and routinely return to when I feel I’m getting ‘rusty.’”
    This brings us to the upcoming exhibition, featuring a large selection of Tan’s landscape work, many painted around the Perth area, that eschew Tan’s usual cast of spiky creatures and thoughtful loners. “These are large paintings, mainly of familiar suburban landscapes,” Tan says. “And I’d love to get back to doing more of this kind of work - just standing in front of something and just painting it as honestly as possible, as simple as it gets.”
    The last year or so have seen Tan receive accolades for a number of works, with the most high profile one being the Oscar he won for the short film, The Lost Thing. Perhaps surprisingly, though, it’s not the award dearest to his heart.
    “The first most personally significant one was the Children’s Book Council Award for The Rabbits in 1998,” he explains. “That was a big deal because it had been such a monumental project: I felt I’d really entered some strange new artistic territory, pushed myself to the limit, and to have that formally acknowledged was a very welcome affirmation. The second most significant recent award was the Astrid Lindgren Award. It’s an acknowledgement of an entire body of work, which has been intensively researched and debated by a jury of children’s literature experts. To receive such a big international prize is really amazing - I’m still coming to terms with it really.”
    The Lindgren Award also came with a significant cash endowment, which allows certain freedoms.
    “I can now probably spend more time doing the kind of projects that have been most important to me,” Tan reflects. “The more personal, idiosyncratic ones. So it’s not unlike receiving an arts grant, something I used to apply for in order to avoid other better-paying freelance illustration. But I’m still working in a space that’s virtually identical to the one I began drawing in as a student, and I haven’t registered any particular mental shift.”

_TRAVIS JOHNSON