Article from The Daily Examiner, Clarence Life,
January 27,2007. Cover page photograph; DEBRAH NOVAK                                           
profiler: IAN THOMSON INTERVIEWS DAVID STEWART

Artist’s Impression

Wooloweyah painter shares his love of the area through his canvases        

When you visit David Stewart’s place at Wooloweyah, the first thing that grabs your attention is the house itself.
It’s a 50s or 60s style beach house – fibro-look and all. David and wife Cassy had it built a few years ago from a design worked on by David and Yamba’s Warren Flynn. Standing on the elevated front verandah, I half expected my uncle Ray’s FJ Holden (complete with white-walled tyres and tennis ball on the tow bar) to turn up at any minute.
Uncle Ray would be lugging a packed steel Esky. Aunty Irene would have a Pavlova for after the barbecue. They were the days. Being where it is, David and Cassy Stewart’s beach house doesn’t offer sweeping views of sand and sea from the front porch. Instead, part of a massive national park fills the eyes. On the covered northern-side deck, a comfortable couch has a backdrop of sun-bleached driftwood and other flotsam strung together with fishing line. This is the house of an artist closely linked to the sea.
And it was the sea that on one dramatic day put David Stewart’s life in real danger. As a boy growing up in Brisbane, his parents often holidayed in Yamba. David grew to love the place and moved there in the early 80s as a qualified commercial artist and screen printer.“ I But he wanted to try something else.”

“ I had this thing about being a deckhand on a prawn trawler out of Yamba,” he recalls while plucking at a ukulele. “ I knocked on doors for about six months and finally got a job on Peter Schaeffer’s trawler, Living Waters.”  On one eventful day, they were trawling six miles off Brooms Head when a gale-force northerly blew up. The howling wind blew the trawler two miles sidewards with its nets down, and tore the boat’s life raft from its mountings, hurling it into the boiling sea. “The storm lasted about an hour and it was pretty scary stuff,” he says. “The life raft was returned to us three days later. It had finished up in Newcastle.”

David Stewart spent six years working on the trawler, before returning to Brisbane to earn a Batchelor of Visual Arts degree at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art. Apart from his work as a visual artist, David was also involved in commercial art, installations, renovations, commissions and murals.

He again put his brushes aside to become an oyster farmer in Brisbane, before returning to the Clarence Valley and setting up as an artist in Wooloweyah.

If there is one thing that has troubled David Stewart over the years, it’s the fact that he’s caught between two geographical loves – the Yamba area and his beloved Moreton Island, a slice of paradise 26 kilometres off Brisbane.

A keen surfer, David met Cassy (another accomplished boardrider) while surfing at Moreton. Cassy grew up on the island and went on to become a physical education teacher in Brisbane.

“We both obviously have close links to Moreton Island,” Cassy says. “But we also love Yamba, Angourie and Wooloweyah. We’ll just have to find the time to live life in both places.”

David Stewart’s current exhibition at Yamba’s arthouse australia gallery reflects his appreciation of his two preferred places on either side of the border. The exhibition is called Here and There.

“Here is a small arch of sand held between two weathered headlands – simply called ‘backbeach’ by the locals,” David says in his notes on the exhibition. “There is the southern end of Moreton Island.

“Both places have unique topographical and cultural features. Both have an equal hold on me. When I am here, I think of there, and when I am there, I think of here.”

David has been painting seascapes and beachscapes sine 1992. His influences for the exhibition running in Yamba until February 10, come from great landscape painters like Charles Condor, John Glover, Conrad Martens, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, William Robinson, Ian Smith, Ralph Wilson and Brett Whiteley.

It was the brilliant Whiteley who influenced one of David’s works called View to Mara Creek. “My initial impressions of the osprey nest at Angourie was of its sculptural aspects,” he says.

“It reminded me of Brett Whiteley’s paintings and sculptures of birds and their nests. With this is mind, I included the foreground tree, reminiscent of Whiteley’s whiplash lines.

“I had no intention of painting the nest. I was hoping to find a view of Clarence Peak. It was the Whiteley connection that prompted this composition. Sadly, weeks after starting this work, the nest disappeared – blown away by a southerly buster.”

David Stewart says he can’t really be labelled as a landscape painter, although being in the Yamba area has allowed him to tackle landscapes, free from any sort of agenda.

“ I basically just let it come off the end of my brush,” he says. A critic recently wrote: “David’s paintings create a window to a view of the coast on the galley wall. His attention to detail is impressive. His sense of space and form create the feeling that you can climb into the frame and become part of the scene.”

Art lovers and those who know talent when they see it, will be hoping David Stewart stays a part of the Yamba scene for a long time to come. Moreton Island is always on his mind, though.

In the meantime, he’s enjoying Wooloweyah life with wife Cassy and the kids – seven-year-old Tom and Jemima, who’s nine. Tom has no trouble knocking out a tune on his ukulele, and Jemima is already showing more than a casual interest in drawing.

Uncle Ray’s FJ Holden never did show up while I was enjoying the company of the Stewart family. And that’s a shame. I really would have liked them to meet them and talk to a man whose affinity with the sea has been captured on canvas.

And the Pavlova would have been nice, too.