"This landscape can be very alienating, gray and angry for days on end," says Scholes
(2 of 2)
Murphy will occasionally find scenes to paint while on walks, but prefers to set up in places he can drive to. He used to agonize about "why do I paint?" but these days hopes only that those who look at the finished product will feel something of what he felt when he was painting it.
"I love the tranquility of rivers," says Murphy, who's particularly taken with the Huon, in the state's southeast. "I paint freely and quickly," with some works started and finished in half an hour. Of the thousands of river landscapes he's painted over the years, plenty are stacked in his studio; at least as many hang in private homes, while others adorn the walls of public buildings, board rooms and offices. "It's a joy," he says of the painting experience. "I forget completely where I am. I'll be whistling and people will come up and stand beside me and I wouldn't know they're there. I once had a snake curl up in my shadow — that's one painting I never finished."
Author Scholes' riverside home was built with celery-top pine poles by her filmmaker husband, who critiques all her material with a rigor at least the equal of anything she encounters further along the chain. Like all writers, she has unproductive days, sometimes fiddling with the same paragraph for hours. At such times, the liquid behemoth out the window soothes. "It puts your preoccupations in perspective," she says. "The work you're doing at the moment is like the foam and the rocks around the edges. But there's this great tidal movement of water that's like the big picture of human history. All the books that have come and gone . . . yours is not the be-all and end-all of everything."
Further east, in her Dunalley boathouse where the gray water of the Denison laps at her back door, Gay Hawkes is busy doing what she always does: making stuff. A sculptor, bush carpenter and teacher whose work is displayed in the Australian National Gallery and Parliament House, Canberra, Hawkes is eccentric, engaging company as she scurries about brewing coffee, flipping pancakes and pointing out some of the objects she's banged, stitched or glued together from materials she's found lying about. When she's not satisfying her own creative drive, she is nourishing that of others — children in remote Aboriginal communities or prisoners. "I can coax people into doing things," she says.
She spends her days at the boathouse — built by a Norwegian sailor a century ago and formerly used, she thinks, for boat-building and fish filleting — before cycling home in the evening. With Blackman Bay to the north and Norfolk Bay to the south, it's exposed to the kind of piercing winds that make her wonder sometimes why she doesn't sell up for a warmer spot. "But then I think, how could I? Just to be able to hear the water . . . I don't know, it's like your own blood," she says. "I'll swim in it. I could do it now. I tell you it's absolutely freezing. It's a mental effort to get your clothes off and run in there, just for a second. But if I don't feel the best in the morning, a bit sluggish, I'll go in the water. That's why I live where I live." While they mightn't share her passion for bathing in it, Hawkes' fellow Tasmanian artists would understand perfectly.