Brisbane-based artist Stephen Nothling works his best when on the precipice of fear and doubt. “I stand before my easel just about every day and think ‘how on earth do I make this happen?’ and by the end of the day it’s an awakening,” he says.
While his main modus operandi is painting realistic depictions of familiar streetscapes in oils, Nothling infuses his scenes with surreal or unexpected elements. “My sensibilities as an artist are inclined toward Pop Art with its deadpan observations of the everyday and embrace of the absurd,” he says. “I enjoy this confusion.”
This dance between confusion and expert execution has garnered Nothling attention during his more than four-decade painting practice. In 1992 he won the highly- regarded Churchie Exhibition of Emerging Art award (now known as “the churchie”); his work was featured by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra during their 1993 concert season; his self-portraits have been selected as finalists in the 2001 Archibald Prize, the 2016 Doug Moran Prize for Portraiture and the 2008 Dobell Prize for Drawing; he had a major public solo exhibition The Last Street in Highgate Hill at the Museum of Brisbane in 2015; his work has appeared in three exhibitions at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; and his solo exhibition count exceeds 41 shows.
“When I was young, the idea of being an artist was impossible to conceive,” he admits. “It wasn’t until a couple of years after leaving art college where I completed a Diploma in Visual Communication majoring in Illustration and being unemployable that I made a rash decision to have a solo exhibition of paintings before I turned 25. It wasn’t particularly successful but did give me a purpose and after a few lean years things began to make sense and I have never stopped exhibiting.”
For Nothling, art-making is about trying to invent new ways of creating images that have personal meaning for himself and his audience. Familiar images emerge: a row of old weatherboard houses backgrounded by a block of new-build, high-rise flats; a campervan and mobile home parked in a suburban backstreet nodding to summer holiday adventures once had, or perhaps yet-to-be; a crane parked in a quiet street waiting to start work on a nearby construction site. With equal parts nostalgia and apprehension, Nothling’s paintings make us long for a time since passed. There is an eerie stillness and beauty in these works as pink skies and the lack of a human presence are offset by knowledge that change is nigh. The success of these works is their preciseness: they capture a world in flux, slowly grinding its way towards the future.
Nothling’s own future is in a similar state of flux with portraits, large paintings of flowers and a series of wrapped vehicles all on his mind. Though, as he says, “This all could change depending on daily circumstances.”
You can catch three of Nothling’s works in Making Place, 100 Views of Brisbane currently showing at the Museum of Brisbane in Brisbane City Hall.
Above: Artist Stephen Nothling at the front of his home/studio in Highgate Hill, Brisbane. Photo: Stephen Hart. Courtesy: the artist.
Stephen Nothling, Blue Crane Beneath a Green Tree, Before a Pink Sky (Hampstead Rd), 2023. Oil on canvas, 75 x 80 cm.
Stephen Nothling, Riding the Wave, 2018. Mixed media on board, 90 x 84 cm.
Stephen Nothling, Annerley Road Trip, 2022. Oil on canvas, 110x 160cm.