Opening on Thursday 1st September at Watson Arts Centre is ‘Too Much Fun’. In this exhibition, Canberra artist Steve Roper brings together two long-term interests: cartooning and painting.
For all his adult life, Roper has kept sketch books in which he draws and writes constantly about what he sees and thinks – at home, when travelling and in his imagination. As an artist, sketch books are a tool he uses to inspire himself and guide the production of major works. However, they have also filled up with silly cartoons of peculiar characters.
This has largely been an end in itself – an opportunity for fun, a joyful antidote to life’s challenges and complexities. Friends and family have always enjoyed these drawings but it’s only recently that Roper has started developing them into finished art works, firstly through sculpting the cartoon characters in clay and then going on to work them into paintings.
Roper’s cartoon characters are found doing all sorts of things, some crazy, some ordinary, some relating directly to his interests and experiences with people, pets and places, and some that are pure folly and imagination.
‘Too Much Fun’ is showing at Watson Arts Centre from Thursday 1st – Sunday 11st September.
