Hobart-based ink botherer Tom O’Hern is promising to draw me a map to a secret cabin in the hills of his native Tasmania (Tazzie to the locals). I’m looking at him, enthused with a clearly deep-rooted love in his hometown, looking at his large-scale drawings with another eye. Frogs are fornicating, rats are fornicating, snakes… Jesus. Everything is fornicating. Angrily. Another work is entitled Thieving Fuckwitasaurus Rex. I look back at Tom, it’s hard not to drift off into The great disappointment, a colossal 198 x 275 cm ink on canvas piece directly behind him. In it, O’Hern has depicted hell on earth. We’re standing in a North Melbourne gallery called Purgatory Artspace. Do I really want this man to send me hiking into the Hobart hills?
“They might look like I’ve got some issues”, the artist says of his works, “but I’m OK now”. You know one of these works is called Paranoid (bubbling like flies and wasps and maggots on a bloating possum), right? David Hagger, one of the duo behind brilliant independent art platform blackartprojects (responsible for bringing O’Hern’s Flat Earth collection to mainland Australia), tells me how they have eschewed the typical artwank blurted out in exhibition bumph, instead letting the artists describe their work: “A big dumb ape with a big dumb brain. Locked in a warehouse and covered in paint. All I need is a cave or a little unabomber shack in the bush with a really good internet connection where I can hide and draw all day with ink made from toad slime and the crushed up bones of roadkill.” Quite.
Truth is, Tom’s a lovely chap. And ridiculously talented. The detail and artistry in these large-scale ink on canvas drawings is immense. They are dark; wicked; funny, natural bedfellows in the making of brilliant outsider art. O’Hern is indeed a talented little man. Still, let him draw me a map to a ‘secret cabin’? Perhaps not.
Thieving Fuckwitasaurus Rex (2014)
ink on canvas
122 x 92 cm
Cold and lonely (2014)
ink on canvas
92 x 122 cm
Paranoid
(bubbling like flies and wasps and
maggots on a bloating possum) (2014)
ink on canvas
122 x 92 cm
The great disappointment (2013)
ink on canvas
198 x 275 cm
