Tasmanian visual artist Tom O'Hern on how he became 'good at drawing really badly'
By Georgie BurgessArtist Tom O'Hern says he'd probably make more money heading out into Tasmania's wild areas with some oils than the art path he has chosen.
Instead of mastering landscape, he said he's become good at drawing badly.
"I'd love to be out in the wilderness somewhere with a huge canvas slapping around oil paints," O'Hern told ABC Radio Hobart.
"But I keep trying and it just doesn't really work."
The Hobart artist is a painter, drawer, muralist and even animator — think Mambo meets Where the Wild Things Are combined with some good old-fashioned doodling.
Over the past 15 years, the 37-year-old's work has become prolific around Hobart, with his quirky murals featuring at schools, in cafes, on boats, inside nightclubs, down alleys and of course — toilets.
"I reckon I've painted 30 toilets around Hobart, probably more. So many toilets," he said.
"I would like to paint museums but I'll take what I can get."
Celebrating imperfections
O'Hern believes the world is too caught up with everything having to be perfect.
"Everyone is looking at perfect things all the time," he said.
"Everything is printed by computers, everything is on a screen and flat."
It's the mistakes and imperfections, he says, that make life interesting.
"Everyone has forgotten that drawing has been around forever and everyone should be able to do it.
"But at some point we got self conscious about it. We get upset if something doesn't look like a photo.
"I guess I'm getting good at drawing badly."
For O'Hern drawing often feels like he is writing.
"Like when I draw a bird or something it's not like I'm trying to draw a realistic bird and get every feather right, it feels like a short hand," he said.
"It feels like the beginnings of new hieroglyphics and I'm discovering some sort of written language that doesn't exist yet."
Learning to draw, badly
Last weekend O'Hern ran a workshop titled How to draw really, really badly.
But, the participants were all good drawers.
"For the ones who were starting out, I said to stop being precious about it," he said.
"For the more experienced ones, it's all about the paradox of becoming experienced and you get all this experience and knowledge and that can block creativity because you're coming at it from already knowing what the answer is.
"But it's better to be open and not know what the answer is."
A lot of his work is public murals, and he approaches each one differently.
"I seem to attack them in totally different ways which I'm sure freaks out clients," he said.
Everyone is born an artist
O'Hern went to school at Geilston Bay High on Hobart's eastern shore and then Rosny College before art school.
He's been making art since then.
"Everyone starts out really into art, it's just that most people stop being into art at some point," he said.
He said "compulsion and an unhealthy addiction to drawing" has kept him going.
"I thought I'd just keep plugging away, it's a pretty good way to spend time," he said.
Early in his career he moved to Melbourne and learnt to live very cheaply and worked out of cold, leaky warehouses.
His first exhibition was in 2005 in Hobart with some other artists and was based around graffiti and street art using stencils and spray paint.
"It was a totally different thing I was trying to do then," he said.
"I now work much more immediately with drawing and seeing what comes out. I try not to slave over stuff as much."
He said people seemed to value how long something took to make.
"The very first thing people ask when I show some art is how long something took, and I really feel like it doesn't make it better if it took ages," he said.
"I'm trying to push back on that, sometimes things take me ages and sometimes they don't and often it's the things made quickly I think actually are better."
He said that can be hard to justify, but it's taken him 20 years to work out the craft.
Bum Steer
O'Hern's current solo exhibition Bum Steer at the Bett Gallery features works he produced on a "secret island" over a month.
"I did a drawing a day, sometimes two," he said.
"It was a really nice way of working. No sketches, no fixing anything up, just see what happens.
"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
More than half have sold, an achievement not lost on an artist who has done the hard yards.
"I've spent so much time in really cold studios flogging myself, when I could also just be on a beach taking it easy and going for a swim," he said.
His other major project at the moment is a commissioned public art piece for the Hobart City Council.
Kids know what to do
He believes younger children make the best drawing students.
"You don't really need to tell them anything, they already know what to do," he said.
"I don't know when the self consciousness settles in.
"Real little kids will just let rip and it's awesome," he said.
He takes great pleasure in seeing his daughter draw.
"I was just looking at a picture of an owl my daughter has drawn, and it's exactly what I'm trying to do," he said.
"It's just a big free owl that I'll spend all day working myself into something like that.
"It's perfect."