In Graham Wilson's world, it's almost an understatement to say every picture tells a story.
His new show, Nindethana, which, in a rare event, opens at two places on Saturday, September 10 - at Straitjacket Gallery from 3pm to 5pm and at The Creator Incubator from 6pm to 8pm - with a different set of works, is testament to his productive travels.
It's Wilson's first solo show since 2019. The pandemic curtailed gallery shows, but also meant Wilson created a lot of art, so he's got several new works to show.
The Incubator show opening will include an original composition by Wilson's friend - accomplished cellist Naomi Dart, and a reading of original poetry by Wilson himself.
Wilson, who is a stonemason, printmaker and artist, has evolved in more than 30 years of practice, with these current works having both oil and acrylic paint and carving into the painted wood.
His working studio at The Creator Incubator, which includes the sign from his days in a Renew Newcastle stall in the old David Jones building under the moniker The Carved Green Man, shows the diversity of his work, past and present.
"I like doing oil paintings," he says.
"I've always done little oil paintings. So I always did the wood carving and that was a separate thing, but I did a piece that was carved and then coloured - water colours and printmaking inks, to roll.
"In the process of doing that, I began painting and then carving into the paint, like the sky, making it blue and carve into it."
The style is a "combination of painting and carving, blurring the edges," he says.
"Often it's the vegetation painted in oils and the rock in acrylic, and of course the carving."
The new works reflect landscapes from his travels, and a few statement paintings. The show features landscapes from locations in the Kimberleys, Uluru, the Warrumbungles and further afield.
One of the featured pieces at Straitjacket is called The Deafening Silence, featuring a "Tasmanian tiger" (thylacine) and Tower of Babel adjacent to Mount Wellington in Hobart, Tasmania.
"In Australia we are silent to the fact we have the highest number of mammal extinctions in the world," Wilson says.
"The thylacine is an example of that. But also, the silence of local languages that have been lost, the silence to massacres of Aboriginal people. The Tower of Babel is there as a symbol to those lost languages."
One of the landscapes is Mimbi Caves Afternoon Light, from a trip to the Kimberleys. The famous site has remnants of an ancient coral reef, more than two kilometres high. It was the site of where a gogo fish was found, the ancestor of all walking animals.
There is a two-panel piece, Kata Tjuta (the Elders) in Uluru. "At night time, the whole place changes colour," Wilson says.
He does not paint on site. Rather, he takes photos, makes drawings and takes a mental note of the colours ("My colours are never right," he says.)
"I try to capture the feeling of the place. It's about the emotion of the place, the energy, the sky, carving the clouds, getting that sort of feeling."
Wilson was a finalist in the 2021 Wynne Prize with his work, Dove Lake Dawn, which shows a reflection of Cradle Mountain on the lake.
His love for serendipity carries over into his ability to tell stories through art. As a student at the University of Newcastle in the early 1990s, Wilson began the "Green Man series", comprising two giant panels and six small panels that told a story in a medieval style about Newcastle.
"I was intending to print them," he says, "but halfway through I thought I really liked the look of the wood, so I coloured the wood, and exhibited the wood instead. So that's where that started. While I was studying printmaking."
That series is called The Green Man Story.
He still practises stonemasonry, too. He's twice been invited to a stonemasons' festival in Norway, contributing a piece for a rose window in an ancient cathedral, which he hopes will stand the test of time.
Wilson also made the bust of revered art dealer Anne von Bertouch, which stands outside her former residence on Laman Street in Newcastle.
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