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Sydney artist and city dweller Tom Carment is highly regarded for his lively landscape paintings, works on paper and expressionistic portraits. He often travels far from his much loved Sydney painting haunts to refresh his palette, and most of the time he prefers to paint solo. Tom is also known for his writing and has collaborated with photographer Michael Wee to produce a refreshingly quirky and beautifully illustrated book which chronicles his recent travels with Michael to remote parts of Australia.
Four years ago over a coffee at his local inner-city cafe his good friend Michael Wee managed to convince Tom to go on some walks into the ‘wild’ parts of Australia. As both were inexperienced long-distance bushwalkers, Michael and Tom had to brush up on their tramping skills the hard way – en route as they traversed hot, rainy, snow-covered, and bushfire-blackened terrain. Tom says, “We approached this project as a pair of amateurs. Our previous experience of bushwalking had been day excursions, for family picnics, photography and painting.”
The book features Michael’s haunting, dramatic photographs, and Tom’s delicately observed watercolours and drawings. Accompanying these lyrical creations are stories of each walk, interweaving history with anecdotes, humour and first-hand observation.
‘Seven Walks’ is the companion book to their adventures and captures the feeling of heading out on foot along a narrow track, into a beautiful untamed landscape.
Helen Garner is a fan and has written: “Tom Carment’s writing, like his art, seduces quietly: austere, highly articulate, always fresh, with a dry sense of the absurd. In this calm, modest register he commands great territories.”
‘Seven Walks: Cape Leeuwin to Bundeena’ is out now.
Tom Carment, Burnt bush, Margaret River, 2012, watercolour on paper, 29 x 27cm
Courtesy the artist
