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Shaun Tan - "Never Drop Your Jar" - oil on canvas
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Never Drop Your Jar
Oil on canvas by Shaun Tan (2012).
Artwork size: 86 x 76 cm (33.9" x 29.9")
Frame size: 88.5 x 78.5 x 4.7 cm (34.8" x 30.9" x 1.9")
"The ‘fishing scene is another I’ve been playing with for years in sketchbooks, originally just as scenes of people fishing the sky, often at night. It’s based partly on childhood memories of catching migrating prawns from under a traffic bridge in the regional town of Mandurah, WA. My parents loved catching all kinds of fish, mussels, octopus, squid, crabs, and almost all of our family holidays were fishing trips. The prawn catching was particularly strange and meditative, scanning a black river for telltale pinpricks of light (prawn eyes) and occasionally catching other small iridescent fish by accident, a quiet world interrupted only by trucks rumbling overhead. The inversion of this feeling into a daylight ‘ocean’ accessible from precarious urban structures – here water tanks from New York City, which I loved photographing on the occasions I’ve visited – feels like a natural transition."
"Most outings with my brother involved local rock fishing, and he was always the better angler. I was often snagging my line, dropping fish or jamming my reel, and Paul would have to stop and help me, which could be particularly inconvenient when the fish were suddenly schooling. In the painting, the older brother has the wisdom to tether his jar. His less competent brother is left to his own problems and regrets. He should have been more careful! The separation of tanks suggests a kind of distant intimacy that many brothers might recognise: you can be completely together in your separateness by sharing a common activity."
"The creatures in the sky were inspired by kite festivals held on wide beaches. They make me think of sea animals that have taken to the air to enjoy a fleeting, almost immaterial existence. I imagine these creatures swimming on tides of air more delicately than butterflies, dangerous and difficult to catch and preserve. As with other pictures, I tend to imagine this scene as a hot summer afternoon; you might hear the popping of iron sheets and baking concrete, snarling peak-hour traffic below. But the things migrating across a bottomless blue sky are cool and languid, swimming far above it all, and just out of reach." —Shaun Tan