West Coast Highway by Shaun Tan

This is a painting of a section of West Coast Highway I used to drive by routinely in my late teens and early twenties a particular bend in the road I always found fascinating and had stopped to photography a sketch a few times. There is something about the compound curves of the road the slight elevation the contrast between naturally open spaces (rock scrub sea and sky) and closed tightly constructed spaces (paths traffic islands rails buildings) that for me perfectly captured the feeling of the area. I wanted to also capture a sense of passing time growth and disintegration. Natural forces of weather and sea continue to erode built structures and those structures continue to be maintained and rebuilt. This is reflected in the painting itself which I rendered a number of times before getting the composition right and you can see faint impressions of preceding landscapes which have been sandpapered back and painted over. The painting is a record of a process as much as a depiction of a landscape. - Shaun Tan Artist