Jim Fagan
There is a note of awe, even affection, when Cooroy artist Trevor Purvis speaks about outback Australia.
“I love the visual stimulation. The quiet is the loudest thing there. You can almost read a newspaper by the stars.”
For the last 17 years Trevor, accompanied by his wife, Beryl, has been touring Australia’s remote regions (“rather like a couple of hippies,” she says) capturing on canvas the rich and colourful vistas of the Kimberleys, Uluru, Lake Eyre, the Simpson Desert, the Canning stock route—1850kms from Halls Creek to Wiluna and even more remote places only known to many of us as dots on a map.
And next Friday, at the official opening of the exhibition, which will end on April 5, Noosa will get the chance to see Trevor’s work.
The Noosa Regional Gallery at Tewantin has invited Trevor to show a selection of his landscapes in an exhibition he is calling Australian Sienna.
As he says, “Sienna to me epitomises the outback colours that do not exist anywhere else except in Australia.”
Trevor’s paintings will be on display in tandem with another local artists’ exhibition which has been titled, More Than the Sum of Its Parts.
According to gallery director, Michael Brennan, between 80 and 90 other Noosa and Sunshine Coast landscape painters have been invited to submit one painting each.
“We are not tackling it with each artwork being given a space on a wall. Instead, we are clustering them altogether from floor to ceiling to recreate a bigger, visual landscape effect. There will be big sections of the gallery where the walls will be empty and then rainforest art will bleed into the ocean-based work.
“We try to give a number of locally based artists a solo exhibition each year and this is the first time we have had such a large group of local artists together.
“Trevor has been very active in the Noosa creative scene for a long time now with Open Studio and holding his own workshops.
“In this kind of space he brings a kind of unique and expressive interpretation of the landscape. I think it will be a really powerful experience when all the works are all shown together,” he said.
Beryl, too, has a place in the exhibition. She grew up in Rhodesia and has developed a range of necklaces, bracelets and other jewellery, all with an African tribal influence. Her work will be on display at the gallery entrance.
Although they have been coming to Noosa since they first came to Australia in 1977 (“we used to camp at the north end of Hastings Street”) it was 2006 before they decided to come here to live.
Trevor, who was born in South Africa, had a career spanning 30 years and was a graphic art designer and creative director for several global advertising agencies like Young and Rubican, McCann Erickson and J Walter Thompson.
He worked in London, New York, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Melbourne and other great cities creating campaigns for clients like Coca Cola, Levi Jeans and Nescafe. In 1985 he won the international Gold Lion Award in Cannes for a Mortein commercial.
“I was pretty pleased about that one,” he said.
He is a also former president of Noosa Open Studio and its Art Trail which is held in October over 10 days.
“It brings about half a million dollars into the art community. It is growing every year. We had 400 people in my studio alone this year.”
Trevor, 73, said: “It’s been a lifelong dream for me to be a successful artist. I was well known in advertising as a creative director but now I want to be known as an artist first and an advertising guy second.”
