Mark Sutherland Artist

Racecourse Road

Oil on board 1986

My work has spanned many disciplines over two and a half decades, making it difficult

even for me to neatly sum up what I’m about. The short answer is that, for as long as I can

remember, I have consciously sought to gain as much knowledge and skill as I could in

every aspect of art that interested me. I love the history of art, and I love the various

challenges presented by painting murals, surfboard blanks, working in resins, creating

portraits, drawing in pen and ink or animating funny characters. The further you go into it,

the more you realise how much there is still to learn.

In 1979, I left school with the idea of becoming an artist. Like all young people, I was keen

to experience all that life had to offer and do it on my own terms. Jack Rhodes was a broken

down surfboard shaper fallen on hard times, living in the hippy enclave of Nimbin. He

showed me how to apply oil paint the way the old masters did, allowing the paint to

maintain its integrity. In many ways, Jack’s life resembled the lives of the great, troubled

artists of history. One man against the world, he clung hard to his art because it was all he

had. Though I can now place the romance of that proposition into a wider perspective, oil

painting remains, for me, where the true romance of art resides. While the golden age of oil

painting as a mainstream medium is long past, we’re told, my greatest wish is to produce

paintings that could sit comfortably beside those of the great masters of the tradition. For

all the technological breakthroughs of the last hundred years, there is still nothing to rival

nature for subtlety, complexity and enduring beauty.

That said, the most ground-breaking and broadly influential artist of the twentieth century

was not Picasso but Walt Disney. The impact that cartoons have had on our appreciation of

the visual image is hard to calculate, but it was certainly vast. Has any artist had more

imitators? A chance to work in an animation studio, in 1981, gave me first-hand experience

of art as a profession, not just some esoteric pursuit. Animation is to visual art what brain

surgery is to first aid – a whole new level. Working with Gwyn Perkins, I learnt how to

draw in a disciplined way, and what a professional sense of humour was. This gave me a

framework with which to solve creative problems. He was the most brilliant individual I

ever worked with.

When I produced Dream, my 35mm animated film, I tried to combine animation with my

love for paint, and based it on experiences in my own life. Even though it screened at the

Sydney Film Festival, nobody really got it. The ones that did get it were too frightened to

do anything with it – its message ran counter to the surf industry’s marketing fantasy. I’d

spent two years working my guts out, in complete isolation, and instead of it opening

doors for me, as I’d hoped, I found myself driving cabs, working on building sites and

wondering what I’d done wrong. Andrew Kidman was the only person I showed it to who

had the guts to offer me a job. He encouraged me to write and to draw and to play music – to

embrace surf culture and play a part in it. We continue to work together on various projects

to this day.

Comic art was a natural progression from animation, in some ways. Writing Gonad Man

also provided an opportunity to express something of the world through the eyes of a

surfer. It became instantly and gratifyingly popular, though it marked me forever as

something of a spokesman for surf culture, something I hadn’t consciously sought. I have

been surfing since I was very small, when Ray Hookham first took my brother and I, friends

of his son Randy, to the beach to go surfing in the late sixties. The heady atmosphere of the

beach scene in those days was not lost on my young psyche, and will be with me forever, I

suspect.

But a surfing background is not something to shout about, I’ve found, if you’re serious

about a career as a fine artist. Not in Australia, anyway. I recently exhibited some paintings

in Sydney, at David Rex-Livingston’s gallery, and was talking to a fellow artist about my

work. He seemed very impressed. A little later, he collared me, having just read my CV.

‘You haven’t exhibited since 1994…? Why?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ I replied, somewhat uncertainly, ‘I was busy, raising a family, working for surf

magazines…’

The look on his face was one of dismay, similar to the looks I used to get from cartoonists

when they found out I could paint. ‘What are you doing here, when you can paint like that?’

they’d say. Like I was somehow wasting my talent. Maybe they’re right, but it seems to me

the disposable nature of print art breeds a false sense of irrelevance among cartoonists,

while the longevity aspired to by those in the fine arts seems to breed an equally false sense

of self-importance. It’s all very strange, because the thought and skill that go into a

successful cartoon are often far greater, in my experience, than the purely sensual response

to the subject that a painting can represent.

All I can say is that my art is a reflection of my life and the times I grew up in. As a kid, I

was just as big a fan of Donald Duck as I was of Monet’s Waterlilies. And surfing was the

freest form of sport, because nobody had to keep score. Somehow, it’s all just stayed with

me.

Mark Sutherland, 2009

MARK SUTHERLAND – Artist CV

Solo Exhibitions

1985 Ralph Martin Gallery, Townsville QLD

1987 Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville QLD

1992 POD Gallery, Surry Hills NSW

1994 Headspace Gallery, Paddington NSW

Group Exhibitions

1986 Painting selected for Sulman Prize Exhibition, AGNSW

'Interior - Woman Watching TV' (Judge: Albert Tucker)

1987 Robin Gibson Gallery, Christmas Stocking Exhibition

1993 Painting selected for Sulman Prize Exhibition, AGNSW

'Blue'

2001-6 Tubular Cels, Silicon Pulp Gallery, Stanmore, NSW

Travelled nationally

2003 Country Energy Landscape Prize, NSW 'Newee Creek'

2003 Surf Style Exhibit 111 Minna Gallery, San Fransisco CA

2004 Bowraville Surf Classic, Bowraville Theatre NSW

Bowraville Art Gallery, Bowraville NSW

2005 Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, Surry Hills NSW

2005 Whitewash 'Surfers That Art', Torquay VIC

2005 II Mostra Internacional de Arte & Cultura Surf, São Paulo

SP Brasil

2006 Art on the Rocks, Sydney NSW

2007 Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, Surry Hills NSW

Awards

1985 Desiderius Orban Youth Award Arts Council of Australia

- Oil painting

1985-87 1st, Neta Phillips Prize, Townsville Qld

1st, Innisfail Art Prize Qld

1st, Townsville Art Prize Qld

2nd, Cloncurry Art Prize Qld

2006 1st, Scotts Head Art Prize NSW

Collections

National Maritime Museum, Sydney

Charters Towers City Council, Qld

Private collections, Australia & worldwide

Films

1989 DREAM 35mm short animated film

Finalist Yoram Gross Short Animated Film Awards,

Sydney Film Festival

Tours nationally with OZ Animation - The New Wave

1994 DREAM screens at Flickerfest, Bondi & Big Day Out,

NSW

1996 DREAM re-released as part of surf documentary Litmus.

1998 GONAD MAN Pilot animation for Southern Star

Entertainment

2003 DREAM re-released on Litmus DVD edition

2004 Animated sequence for surf documentary Glass Love

2005 Commissioned Judge, I Festival Internacional de Cinema

Surf, São Paulo SP Brasil

Publications

1993-99 Wrote and illustrated GONAD MAN cartoon in Waves

Wrote and illustrated extensively for Tracks, Waves and

various Australian and international surf publications

1996 GONAD MAN anthology of cartoons published, sells out

15,000 print run

Pen & ink drawings featured in The Surfer's Journal

quarterly magazine, USA

1998 Illustrations for Melba column, The Australian newspaper

1998-99 Wrote and illustrated opinion column The Heckler FHM

magazine, Australia

Feature interviews in Surfing World & Waves magazines

2004 Featured interview, 14pp Surfers Path magazine, UK &

Worldwide editions

2006 Feature article & artwork ‘Brasil’ Alma Surf magazine,

Brasil

2009 Feature article & artwork ‘My Life as a Surf Cult’

Kurungabaa Journal, UNSW Launched GONAD MAN as a subscriber-based online

comic