For artist Zak Tilley, who has been painting Australian landscapes for years, moving from the east coast to the Red Centre provided fresh perspective.
Words Ceri David
Photography Sara Maiorino
The notion of ‘art’ can be loaded with lofty associations: pristine, climate-controlled galleries; chicly dressed curators; investors willing to spend thousands. It’s a world that has very little in common with the realities of how the sausage is made, if you ask Zak Tilley.
Based for the past three years in Alice Springs, 28-year-old Zak roams the surrounding countryside to paint the burnt-umber earth, sinewy trees and surging rivers that inspire his works. ‘It can get very hot; there’s no shade. Everything gets dirty and dusty,’ he says. ‘It can be a mood killer when you’re covered in flies.’
None of which does much to put him off. That’s the way it tends to be with a labour of love. He first fell in love with Alice on a road trip in 2014. ‘I was impressed by the landscape and the culture,’ he recalls. ‘I stayed for a month and really got to see what it was like. It’s a beautiful community of people, or several different communities. It’s—for lack of a better word—diverse. I could see myself living here.’
So he made it happen. With a degree in fine arts already under his belt, he returned to Sydney and studied to become a visual arts teacher, selecting Alice Springs for his final placement. ‘I did a month of teaching and then stayed on.’
Until that point, his works had focused chiefly on the eastern seaboard, having grown up in Sydney’s west. The shift in location was eye-opening.
‘I’d been painting Australian landscapes and feeling a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality,’ he says, ‘but, moving to Alice, I came up against conflicting ideas of identity and belonging to the landscape.’
That tension is at the heart of his output. His 2020 exhibition, Ferals, for instance, is described on his website as ‘a bold and experimental creative inquiry into the connections and parallels between the artistic practice of Zak Tilley, a white person living and working in the Central Desert region of Australia, and invasive species of feral animals that are now pervasive in the area’.
Does he feel like an intruder? ‘Absolutely. It was interesting to have those thoughts and to consider that I hadn’t necessarily had them before, when painting on the east coast. So why do I feel that way now, when it’s all Aboriginal land?’
The answer, of course, is that Indigenous life is far more visible in Central Australia.
‘Now when I paint, and I see what comes up, it feels more loaded,’ he continues. ‘Why I’m here and how I got here and why I have the privilege to feel I identify with this landscape, and share that landscape. It’s good to critically reflect on everything we do, and the impact it has. Not overcomplicating or over- politicising it, but just being aware of it.’
Alongside producing his own work—including his latest solo exhibition The Few and Far, held recently at Otomys Gallery in Melbourne—Zak does art-based outreach work. Workshops are offered free to young people, often in Papunya, a community that’s a three-hour drive away in his dusty HiLux.
When he isn’t there, or trekking through Finke Gorge National Park to paint red cabbage palms in the relentless heat, he can be found at the studio he rents in the centre of Alice Springs. ‘It’s an old house owned by the National Trust, with a wraparound verandah and high ceilings and beautiful floorboards.’
It’s there that he’s lately begun to enjoy painting from memory. ‘I used to think it was a cop-out, like I was making up a landscape—cheating,’ he says, ‘but it’s been quite interesting to do it in an abstract way, and to see what elements I add; what internal, unconscious ideas I have. It’s like another lens.’
Right now, though, Zak is taking a break and travelling. ‘We haven’t really experienced lockdowns, but it’s been pretty insular. We’ve been at the whim of border restrictions: unable to leave, or unable to get back into Alice if we leave. It seemed as though every time I did leave the Northern Territory, there’d be an outbreak and I’d get stuck and have to isolate.’
He’s planned a long-overdue visit to see his family, who still live in Sydney, as well as trips to Stradbroke Island and Melbourne. But what he’s most looking forward to is time away from his canvases.
‘Sometimes I just really need to not do it at all.’
Which raises the question: could he ever envisage life without art? ‘It’s the only thing I’ve been drawn to, right from kindergarten,’ he says. ‘I was always told I was good, even then, which is weird to me now.’
It seems that for Zak, art is more of a given than a conscious decision.
‘The skill came before the interest, perhaps,’ he says. ‘I’m very passionate about it now, but sometimes I think about how that came about: the fact is, it’s what I’ve always known. It’s not something I chose.’
