Biography – Brent Shegog

- 1960 Born Queenstown Tasmania
- 1977 lived 3 years on King Island in Bass Straight
- 1981 Lived 2 years Flinders Island
- 1982 Relocated to Melbourne

Painted in oils since 15 years of age.

"Each painting is a snapshot of a personal experience, something read, something seen, something heard, combined always with something personally felt"

Origins of the Artwork

After leaving his birthplace of Queenstown Tasmania as a small baby, subsequent youthful visits back to the West Coast of Tasmania, to Gormanstown, now a ghost town, and Queenstown in particular, have left an indelible mark on the artist's work. The area was formerly a copper mining town, whose vegetation was killed off by the process of the smelting of the ore. What remained was a barren rocky "moonscape" which became part of the attraction of this area to tourists until the return of vegetation growth when smelting ceased. Several years of living on the isolated Bass Strait islands of King and Flinders Islands have also left their mark. Nearly all of his paintings reflect a sparse, barren bleakness.

Artistic influences that have fed the imagination and helped contribute to the style and imagery of the works include Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock, Peter Booth, Frank Auerbach, Pierre Puvis De Chavannes and Arnold Bocklin. All have, in some small way, enriched artistically or reinforced the direction of the artist's work.  Individual works such as De Chavanne's "the Poor Fisherman" (Circa 1881), reflect a similar pictorial mood. The brooding angst reflected in both the colour and pictorial imagery of Munch’s work also has some similar parallels.

Literature such as "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad with its powerful story of a journey into Colonial Africa, and more importantly its journey into the dark recesses of it main character, have also impacted on the work in general.

The larger paintings reflect the vastness of barren spaces and their quiet emptiness echoes with an implied threat. Grey rock surfaces, with dividing roadways, lead to horizons that appear to be as devoid of life as the path from which they first came. Sometimes there are signs of man, a square shaped block of stone, a wagon track or embedded totems in hillsides or fallen amongst the rubble. It appears as though humanity has left in a hurry, the remains deteriorating or having never really being established to begin with. The sky always has a life of its own, sometimes with a searing red sun that blazes across the heavens or one of blinding white that fills the vista with cold. It is a world of opposites, of birth and expiry, of heat and cold, of free flowing white rivers or large black expanses of slow moving water. Any figures that inhabit the canvases are usually thrust to the forefront creating the effect of once being removed from their surroundings, observing but also of being "at the viewer" by their positioning. This is a world of imagery where you can never truly have your own "place" in a permanent sense. The spaces reflect the viewers own stories as much as the artists. You can overlay your own experiences into the imagery and see your own stories.

Exhibitions:

2005 Group Show "expressions" Annual Art Show Doutta Galla, Melbourne
2005 Group Show "He Who Inspires" Walker St Gallery Dandenong
2006 Group Show " He Who Belongs" Walker St Gallery Dandenong
2006 Solo Show "Wasteland" Royal Melbourne Hospital Conference Centre

2007 Group Show "He Who Dreams" Walker St Gallery Dandenong