AUSSIE SHEEPMAN WHO LIVED NEAR HELL SKETCHES WILDLIFE IN AFRICA
By Eric Shackle
Chris McClelland somehow use to manage a large Australian sheep station (ranch) yet found time to sketch lions and elephants in the wilds of Africa, and earn recognition as one of the world's finest wildlife artists.
He is returning in 2003 for his seventh visit to Africa. His home now is in the township of Hay, in far western New south Wales.. He left the 180,000 acre Tupra property, which he managed for the McLachlan family (his employers for 30 years) in January 2003 . Chris would attended to 40,000 sheep, his wife Margie sold prints of his drawings on the Internet to art collectors around the world.
The McClelland's Internet website www.users.bigpond.com/wildprints greets the visitor with "The Lace Monitor" drawing, which depicts an Australian Goanna seen on Tupra Station.. You'll find some of Chris's fine pencil sketches on that site, together with details of his unusual career. His natural talent was recognised at school where he won numerous art prizes.
His days as a jackeroo - that's the Aussie name for a trainee cowboy (or should that be shepherd?) inspired a series of action drawings of buckjumping nags (cayuses). Later, as a station manager he enjoyed playing Polocrosse, and sometimes drew ponies he had ridden. One of his paintings was featured on the front cover of Polocrosse magazine.
In 1994 Chris, wife Margie and daughter Miranda spent three weeks on safari, traveling overland through East Africa. Chris concentrated on his video and also kept a detailed diary of their travels. Margie and Miranda shot numerous photographs of the scenery and the wildlife animals and birds.
On their return to Hay, Chris combined his diary and Margie's photographs into book form for his family, then decided to illustrate it as well with his own drawings. Four of those drawings went into a limited edition print set in April, 1996. A drawing entitled The River Horses won the Catani Drawing Award at that year's annual exhibition of the Wildlife Art Society of Australasia in Melbourne, the first professional exhibition Chris had entered.
Chris and family, including son Lochiel, made a return trip to Africa in May, 1996, visiting Lake Kariba, Deception Valley Kalahari, Okavango Delta, the Moremi Wildlife Reserve, Chobe National Park, Victoria Falls and Harare. That trip led to Chris sketching Tracks of Destiny, a pencil and gouache drawing of painted hunting dogs, an endangered species which played around the safari truck for half an hour. He took more than 200 hours to complete the drawing in meticulous detail. (Gouache is a way of painting in opaque colours ground in water and thickened with gum and honey... sounds good enough to eat).
In May 1997 Landela Safari invited Chris and Margie to visit their five lodges in Zimbabwe. Chris produced a collage of scenes around the lodges and some of the animals he had encountered nearby. Stewart Cranswick, part owner of Landela Lodges, was so pleased with the drawings that he arranged to sell original-size prints and postcards of them at the lodges.
In November 1997 Chris released another print, Pride of the Plains, a pencil drawing of a family group of lions. This, like some of his earlier work, appeared in the African Safari Magazine. Cranswick invited Chris to return to Africa to draw his two new safari camps.
"People are always asking 'Why doesn't he draw Australian animals?'" Margie said this week. "He draws African animals to relax from what he sees every day, at places he enjoys visiting. I think when he retires he will be drawing Aussie animals. He did draw an Australian wedge-tailed eagle to appease people."
Kenneth Jack, the only living Australian member of the Royal Watercolour Society of London, says "Chris is a very gifted all-round person to manage a large sheep station and be able to do all the relevant types of work that needs to be done to ensure that all runs smoothly. To think that the same hands move to pencil and paper and produce such sensitive drawings of animals in their landscape setting is nothing less than amazing."
And what do the local art critics think of Chris's work? "The drawings are superb - no wonder the prints are selling well," says Graham Smith, of the Riverina Gallery in Wagga Wagga.
Chris isn't Australia's only talented outback artist. Helen Norton, who works in a shed on an industrial site in the remote pearling town of Broome, in Western Australia, once earned a living trapping feral cats and shooting rabbits. She now produces "whimsical, colorful paintings" which she showed recently to Time magazine art critic, Australian-born Robert Hughes, who was enjoying a fishing vacation there.
In the Sydney Morning Herald of October 28, 2000, Lindsay Olney wrote: "Hughes was fascinated... that she could produce work of such quality with so little training. He was also intrigued by her background and quizzed her about rifles, rabbit-skinning and the like."
A local art dealer said "Helen Norton draws upon the isolation and elemental beauty of the Kimberley as inspiration for her paintings. Noted for her vibrant use of color, Helen describes living in Broome as 'sitting on the rim' and says that as a result, she can see things more clearly."
FOOTNOTE. Chris McClelland lives 50 miles from his nearest town, Hay (population 2817) which is in the Riverina region of New South Wales, 481 miles west of Sydney and 255 miles north of Melbourne. Until now, its main claim to fame has been the bush poet A. B. (Banjo) Paterson's mention of Hay, Hell and Booligal, referring to the region's extreme summer heat ("Hell" was One Tree Plain, 25 miles north of Hay). You can see the poem on the Internet at http://www.uq.edu.au/~mlwham/banjo/hay_and_hell_and_booligal.html..
Click on these pages to see some of Chris's drawings:
www.wildprints.com.au
www.wildprints.com.au/exhibits.htm
www.wildprints.com.au/1999.htm
www.wildprints.com.au/2000.htm
and there's a photograph of some of the 40,000 sheep at Tupra station (ranch) at
http://www.wildprints.com.au/history.htm
and a portrait of the artist at http://www.wildprints.com.au/Reviews.htm
Eric Shackle is a retired journalist who spends much of his spare time surfing the
Internet and writing about it. His articles have been published by leading newspapers
including the New York Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail (Canada), the Sydney Morning
Herald (Australia), and the Straits Times (Singapore).