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Shaun Tan - "The Rules of Summer (grasslands)" - acrylic and oil on paper
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The Rules of Summer (grasslands)
Acrylic and oil on paper by Shaun Tan (2012).
Artwork size: 56 x 50.5 cm ( 22.0" x 19.9")
Frame size: 66.2 x 60.2 x 4 cm ( 26.1" x 23.7" x 1.6")
"This image that came to me very quickly and intuitively, partly in response to my editor, Helen, suggesting I should paint something that gives the feeling of ‘high summer’. I spent a lot of long, very hot childhood summers wandering with my brother and friends through West Australian landscapes, either on holiday in the country or at home in our still mostly undeveloped coastal suburb. It felt like a very static and eternal place and, in hindsight, even a bit primeval or mythological. We were always finding bits of junk and playing with them, as people often dumped cars, busted white goods and TVs in bushy fields or dunes, so that memory partly informs the image of junk lying in grass, out of which something unexpected might be constructed or played with (not recommended, like many childhood experiences of that time!)"
"The distant crow or raven appearing throughout this book, which also appears in a lot of my other paintings and stories, was a common sight within this landscape. The Australian Raven has a particularly long and drawn-out call, often quite unnerving, like an animal dying of thirst or experiencing an existential crisis; ‘waaaaaaah!’ I’ve always been fascinated by these birds, gliding and hopping about electrical wires like omnipresent observers of all human folly."
"The factory in the distance is an interesting element too, suggesting a kind of industrial world operating at the margins. I think it relates to having grown up in a world where nature is always compromised, it’s not a ‘pure’ landscape, but there’s still beauty in all these things, and the residual junk it leaves behind. I realised much later that this image might have been partly influenced by the well-known Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World of a lonely girl lying in a field, looking away to a distant house (which also helped inspire Terrence Malick’s film Days of Heaven, the atmosphere of which appeals to me). Wyeth’s image feels like one moment in an unknown narrative: simple, unsettling and hard to explain. Those are qualities that to which I often aspire with my own images."
"The mechanical creatures here appear later in the painting ‘Never be late for a parade’. I imagine this scene as a bit of a prelude. The older brother has made his first mechanical companion while the younger brother is still playing with found parts, either because of a shorter attention span, a lack of expertise, or that he just doesn’t understand the peculiar rules, whatever they might be in this instance. He has yet to figure out his place in the world, and is for the moment little more than a bemused, innocent eye. He looks directly at the reader, the only time this happens in the book, inviting us to make sense of something fundamentally irrational. The debossing (indentation) of the eye’s pupil on the hardback cover is a way of drawing some attention to the viewpoint of the unseen younger brother." —Shaun Tan