Oh, wow. What a size. I was going to say, I think it's almost me.
Hello, I'm Rob. I'm a painter from Castlemaine in Victoria.
Hi, I'm Costa and I love nature.
It was a nice meeting actually. Costa hopped off the train, so he caught the train from Southern Cross to Castlemaine and he came to our place and he mentioned that he'd missed breakfast because he had to run for the train while someone was chatting about something to him and he missed picking up his sandwich. So my wife being a real feeder immediately whipped out like a beautiful bowl of congee and we sat in the backyard and that warmed up Costa. I think that you know made everything comfortable. It always helps everything kind of land after a good meal. And for me that was like the equivalent of a Greek of avgolemono. Like it was just a hug and then everything was just on a totally cleared level, content, I've arrived and I felt so, so, so welcome.
Everything kind of just unfolded. Everything just kind of came out which gave me a larger picture of from the person that I'd experienced, you know, sitting in front of Gardening Australia with my dad. We did that every Friday night because I stay at Dad's house. It was really wild to see the person on screen in the backyards everywhere and then in sitting in my backyard having some congee and, you know, partaking in a portrait process.
Yeah. The idea was, yeah, to kind of picture Costa and a place. So I saw a garden. with a path and I thought that was really lovely and indicative of the way I met Costa, just popping off the train. Costa obviously has a grasp on that because he's always moving from WA to the East Coast and everywhere in between and planting little seeds of inspiration and imparting his wonderful knowledge to everybody and just the passion.
It's interesting what Rob's said about how I didn't speak of a specific landscape. I really appreciate it that it wasn't a specific because not the, oh, you know, pick your favourite child. I think there's a bit of every landscape in that photo without it being this prescriptive thing. In the foreground there's a lot of plants and foliage but it gives way to this expanse, which looks like a kind of rural expanse, a bit of kind of cleared land and a bit of a few gum trees. Yeah, and that mid-range is a bit of Blue Mountains because you've got the colour and the tone in there. Yeah. Like, so there's kind of scale.
When I think about my life and where it goes, you know, and given that this is the National Portrait Gallery, yeah, it's not just this blow-up of my noggin, you know, just like, oh, there is, that's, that's him. Like, I'd, I think. I think you've really struck like right on. Yeah. I just think that it's right on the money because it didn't confine me to just one facet of my world. It's big. I mean, I think initially when I walk in, I'm just looking at the whole thing and just like, and just like, whoa, and like seeing it in the gallery. Like, it's like, this is, this is pretty full on.
Yeah, I just think, no, the title really moved me. That's a really nice title. Thanks, Costa. So I was just getting my head around that, but then when I went up and read the title, that's what pushed me over the edge. I just think it's so beautiful, like, it's not ours, it's us. Oh, that's really so, it says everything. Like, that is, that's purely First Nations, that's my connection to country. Like, they are country. Oh, the title. You got me. Oh, good. Good. You really got me.
