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Geoff Dyer - Vision Splendid

No one does moody Tasmanian landscapes & seascapes quite like Geoff Dyer. Susie Burge meets the award-winning painter on his home turf.

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Geoff Dyer in his Hobart studio; creative mess - the artist's studio; Ocean Beach oil on canvas 122 x 213cm


Geoff Dyer picks me up from my hotel in a battered old green BMW, ashtray overflowing, cigarette ash drifting in the air. His weathered face cracks into a roguish grin. We arrive at his studio, in an old brewery. Unlocking the door, he apologises for the mess. I don’t mind mess, I respond (this is true). “This is where it happens!” he announces with a self-deprecating flourish.

I enter an artist’s studio from central casting: paint-splattered raw floor, worn leather club chairs, canvasses stacked and propped, buckets, rags, tubes, brushes, papers, boots – everything crusted in oil paint. It’s situated in a turn-of-the-century building with exposed rafters and unrendered rough-painted brick walls. The windows are original, arched and flooded with pale Hobart light.
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Art City - MONA putting the ART into HobART

There’s a new player on the world art stage and it’s a little city on a little island at the bottom of a big island that’s (almost) at the bottom of the world. David Walsh’s extraordinary Museum of Old and New Art, MONA, has been open a year. Susie Burge visits the second exhibition.

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Images from top clockwise: Artist Wim Delvoye with Concrete Mixer (Roses), 1991, carved teak wood; Untitled - Osama, 2002 - 2003, tattooed pigskin; Double Helix DS 180 45, 2008, Berlin silver; Julius Popp Bit.Fall; Tim, 2006-now, tattooed human skin; Untitled (Monday), 2008, stained glass, steel, lead (All artworks Studio Wim Delvoye, Belgium, except for Bit.Fall (word waterfall) by Julius Popp)


“It’s so relaxing, I could watch it all day,” muses Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. We are in MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, standing in front of one of his own creations, a video piece, microscopic camera footage of worm-like excretions of pus squeezed from blackheads in a human nose. “Look, it’s so beautiful,” he goes on. “It’s like a pussy - look, now they are having sex.” Read More...