Living local
| Living local |
| Written by Adam Bub |
 With high camp gloss and a personal touch, gay artist Garry McEwan’s colourful new exhibition explores day-to-day life in the Eastern Suburbs. He speaks with Adam Bub.Stop for a moment and think about your favourite hangouts in East Sydney. Oxford Street? Bourke Street Bakery? The Tropicana Café? OK, so the list could go on for a while, and would differ dramatically from person to person, but Potts Point artist Garry McEwan does a good job of identifying the hotspots of King’s Cross, Darlinghurst, Surry Hills and Potts Point (including the locations mentioned above) in his latest exhibition of works on paper, ‘Local’. “It’s called Local because all of the paintings are scenes from the Eastern Suburbs, where I live, and some of the favourite places I go to with my partner and friends,” he tells SX. “I’ve always done series of works around where I live, and I just get inspiration walking to work and walking home, and I see something that’ll be the right colours and the right light and I think, ‘Yeah, that’s cool’. But the other thing too is that everything changes so quickly – things disappear and change, so it’s recording history at the same time.” But McEwan’s paintings avoid a strictly documentarian approach, instead building a romantic ode to the hubs of community activity – the trendy cafes, shops and streets that populate eastern Sydney. McEwan creates postcards of daily life that are underpinned by an air of whimsy, saturated in vibrant colour and enlivened by mixed media (from collage to oil pastels to lolly wrappers). “I try to make them a little bit over the top rather than just plain flat images,” he explains. “It gives them a nice 3D feel, so I might use a King’s Cross train ticket in there, or stamps or Chupa Chup wrappers and stuff like that. I put a lot of glitter in to create reflections in shop windows in the paintings. It brings them alive.”
McEwan, 49, has established himself as a successful artist over the years, previously running his own self-titled gallery space in Melbourne’s funky Acland Street in St Kilda for 20 years. When McEwan and his partner relocated to Sydney a few years back, they launched Bang! Art and Gift in Potts Point, a quirky arts and gift shop (featuring such camp novelty delights as a sequined computer mouse cover, and outstanding artworks such as handblown glass from Australia’s best glassblowers), and a gallery, where McEwan represents Australian glass and sculpture artists, and displays his own work twice a year. “We put it all together to be uplifting, vibrant and funky. It’s kind of a New York space that we’ve got here,” he says. Surrounded by creativity and innovation, McEwan notes that being an artist is a lifelong learning and experimentation process, adding that inspiration is never hard to find. “I’ve got a lot of artist friends and some complain about having blocks, but I don’t have that problem at all – I’ve got a hundred thousand ideas in my head just waiting to jump out,” he laughs. “With this series, there’s about 24 new works, that’s quite a bit but you’ve got to stop somewhere!”
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With such a visible camp sensibility, McEwan’s paintings pay particular homage to the gay-friendly spaces of the Eastern Suburbs, including images of Oxford Street during Mardi Gras time, and the iconic centre of queer literary (and pictorial) matters, the Bookshop Darlinghurst. McEwan sends a frank message to any places that are not welcoming of GLBT people: “If they’re not gay-friendly I don’t want to know about them”.
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