L'œil ironique de Trevor Dickinson pour l'Australie

Entretien réalisé par Murray Dewhurst. 

I’ve enjoyed your sketches on Flickr now for some time, they stand out with your distinctive style, characterised by strong hatching, can you tell us a bit about how your style developed?

The Aboriginal Embassy, Canberra

As a boy I loved Marvel comics, I read the British black and white reprints and I think the lack of colour helped me focus on, and fall in love with, the drawing. I would copy them badly and realise how out of my league the artists were; it started my lifelong interest in line art.  

Fast forward to 2009, I was well into a career as a textile designer and had immigrated to Australia (I’m from Swindon, England originally) and was looking for a way to connect with the country, so I began to go out sketching.  My big inspiration at this stage was Robert Crumb.  It wasn’t so much his comic art I was looking at, it was the drawings of forests and streets in France that hooked me. His work is technically brilliant and precise, but still feels fresh and loose, it definitely opened a door for me.

Sunset Caravan Park, Woolgoolga, NSW

What I find even more interesting than your technique though is your sense of humour. It’s your eye for the bizarre in the everyday that often brings a smile to my face. Does where you come from originally effect your view of Australia or have you always had an eye for the odd or ridiculous regardless of where you live?

Anyone who travels to a foreign country will see it with fresh eyes and this is what I want to represent.  I usually aim to have some kind of new angle to the subjects and finding a good visual gag on the street is enough to make me spend time drawing it.  I was initially trying to highlight elements that were different to the UK but it soon morphed into an obsession with drawing under-represented details. I think these speak volumes about an urban environment. I also like the ground level localism that the drawings appeal to.  So I draw signs, billboards,  postboxes, urban trees, bus shelters etc. I do my best to find the ridiculous whenever possible, but sometimes the humour is just in the fact that I have spent three hours on a sad drawing of an overflowing wheelie bin.

Local Signwriting, Newcastle

What materials and setup do you use when you sketch on site? (how long do you usually
sketch for, do you put down pencil first or rip straight in, etc, etc)

I draw with Rotring Tikki pens, usually 0.5 size.  I also use pen and ink occasionally.

I sometimes go straight into them without any pencil work, I like being forced to keep the mistakes; it gives the drawings a human quality.  If it’s a drawing that I want to colour and sell as a print I might spend a bit longer and use a pencil to plot it out.

Parkes Wa, Canberra

‘The love shack’ and ‘Share a coke with a christian’ – Does it take time to find these gems or do you just stumble upon them?

A bit of both, I’m always on the lookout for subjects and I find cycling is the best way to search for things and often I go out on my bike with a sketchbook and foldup stool to scour areas I’m not too familiar with.  I always have a list of potential drawings that I intend to get to.

I used to be a dispatch rider in London and I’d bike from one end of town to the other without taking in any of the details, it’s easy to slip into that way of traveling again and I fight against it. I still discover subjects that I have passed many times but not noticed, it’s about being in the right frame of mind and always looking.

Bondi Icebergs, Sydney

315 High Street, Maitland, NSW

How does your sketching on location tie in to your art practice –
I see some of them end up as posters?

Amazingly my city drawings have become a full time job.  Coming from a commercial background I always like to have an end product and I initially collected the drawings into zines, then I printed alternative tourist tea-towels and made cards.  This progressed to selling editions of digital prints, some are inspired by travel posters.  I now have a body of work from Newcastle, Canberra and some Sydney.  The drawings have also led to a few large mural commissions and, although it’s a lot of work, I find I can make a living from the art.

In 2016 I have an exhibition in Maitland Regional Art Gallery NSW.  It will be a portrait of Maitland which is a small Australian city about thirty minutes from where I live. It’s the perfect size to get to know fairly quickly, I can’t wait to search for and collect all those odd details that give the city it’s character.

Visit Trevor’s Flickr ou site web to see more

of his work.