Heart of the Nation: Truganina 3029

ARTIST Ash Keating says there's something "liberating" about eschewing the traditional tools of his trade, like brushes and easels.

Truganina

ARTIST Ash Keating says there's something "liberating" about eschewing the traditional tools of his trade, like brushes and easels, and simply lobbing hundreds of litres of paint around instead.

He's pictured working on West Park Proposition - a huge abstract mural, 50m wide and 8m high, on the side of a concrete warehouse in Melbourne's west. With only one morning to complete the work he resorted to radical tactics, filling buckets and fire-extinguishers with 350 litres of diluted paint and showering the wall.

The 32-year-old Monash graduate first noticed the tilt-slab concrete warehouses that were "popping up like mushrooms" on Melbourne's urban/rural boundary while driving to Ballarat one day. "I thought they looked absurd," he says, "and I wanted to make a comment about that by creating a painting on one of the warehouses that would reflect the landscape it was taking over." His artistic "intervention", as he calls it, would use a palette mimicking colours of the local environment - the dirt, the grasses and native flowers, the trees and the sky - so that from a distance, the warehouse would melt away into its surroundings.

It wasn't easy getting permission - he rarely got past reception when trying to pitch the idea to various warehouse owners - but he finally found an online sports retailer in Truganina who was amenable.

Keating, whose early inspirations were Fred Williams and John Olsen, executed the painting on the morning of September 1 last year. The "physically exhausting" process was recorded by a film crew, and turned into a video installation that was bought by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Monash Museum of Art.

The warehouse owner liked it too, Keating says. Punters aren't always so pleased. Another of his recent public art projects involved intercepting 50 tonnes of industrial waste on its way to a landfill, and dumping it in the centre of Penrith, west of Sydney. The intention was to spark a meaningful debate about society's profligacy - but not everyone saw it like that. "Some people were very unhappy," he says.