By Phil Jarratt
Hard-working artist Owen Cavanagh knows how to attract attention. His tin shed mural of Mudjimba Island by the edge of the motorway at Coolum has been doing just that for nearly 20 years now, and has been back in the news lately as Sunshine Coast Council and Sunshine Coast Airport prepare the iconic art for life after the tin shed.
It’s also made the news for all the wrong reasons, like in 2016, when graffiti artists decided to take art into their own hands by tagging it. On that occasion Owen and wife Natasha nearly died trying to fix it when they rolled their paint-filled car driving from Gladstone on the mission of mercy. But, typical of Owen, they were still there by the motorway applying a fresh coat by the next afternoon.
A third-generation Sunny Coaster, Owen went to school in Buderim and learnt to surf at Double Island Point on trips with his fishing-mad dad. By the ‘90s he was surf-crazed and interrupted his career as a spray painter to spend a winter on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where local surfer Gary Elkerton was battling for a world title. In Waikiki, Owen first encountered the work of celebrated artist Wyland, whose aquatic air-brush art was taking the world by storm. He suddenly knew where his life was going.
Back in Australia he located the best airbrush art teacher in the country who happened to be in Melbourne, moved there and completed a course. He experimented with a variety of mediums, then one day a friend suggested he paint a surf scene on corrugated iron. He’d found his signature.
The ultimate expression of this genre is the giant mural by the Sunshine Coast Motorway, but when he gained permission from the owners of the sugar cane property to paint it, he realised its scope was way beyond anything he’d done before. Undaunted, he just started in one corner and watched what happened. Now there are smaller but impressive murals all over the place – the one in Peregian Village is particularly striking – and thanks to a number of successful exhibitions and commissions to produce trophies for surfing events, Owen’s corrugated iron art pieces, big and small, can be found all over the surfing world.
This writer is the proud owner of the smallest corrugated iron trophy ever made (having made the final of a local comp a couple of years ago) but it stares down at me from a shelf in my office and makes me happy. Says Owen: “I love doing trophies because they’re all slightly different, and there’s a bit of me in each one.” In 2005 Owen took his art styles to Europe, worked on commissions in sheds from Hossegor to Mundaka, and over a few years put his unique brand firmly on the Basque coasts of France and Spain.
The latest twist in the corrugated iron story is rust. Owen loves the effect of painting on a rusty sheet of tin, so he’s incorporating it into much of his new work. In fact, his huge new studio in the Coolum industrial estate is full of rusty tin from building sites and other well-used materials he is “up-cycling” in his art. A genuine bower bird, he nicks fence posts, wire and driftwood from his parents’ property, collects foam offcuts from the shaping bays and resin from the drip trays at local surfboard factories, and bits of chain or interesting branches wherever he finds them. An experimental sculpture taking shape at the front of his studio includes a rotting surfboard from a mate’s backyard, a vaguely bird-shaped branch he found near his donga while keeping the wolf from the door with a FIFO stint out west, part of an old bridge near Gympie, and some stones from the Mary River. He says: “I just start building these things and see where they lead me.” Where they’re leading him is towards a growing cult following in Australia and around the world. Now 53, Owen is hoping that the commercial space offered by his new Coolum SoleArte studio will mean that his FIFO days are over and he can devote all of his time to his art.
Check out this interesting local artist’s work at www.solearte.com.au
