RON Driscoll has a thing for people’s faces. If he sees one with a story behind it, he just has to paint it. The Thomastown resident has been known to stop people in his local shopping centre and ask if he can photograph their faces so he can paint them later.
When he saw the face of Kinglake resident Ian Holman on the front of NW’s January 31 edition – marking the three-year anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires – he felt that urge to pick up his brushes.
“I saw the shadows on his face and a good character. I was just playing around with it on the canvas at first, and then I ended up doing the whole thing,” Driscoll says.
He’s sitting in his lounge room with Holman, who has driven down to collect his portrait after Driscoll made contact through NW. It’s the second time they’ve met; the first was while the portrait was in progress. This handover is a chance for a cup of tea and a chat.
“I would never have dreamed of having a portrait done, so it’s very nice to think someone was inspired to do it,” Holman says. “I think he’s captured parts of me that other people wouldn’t get.”
Holman says he has been amazed and heartened by many acts of generosity from strangers since the Black Saturday fires razed the dream home he had bought just seven weeks before. There was the woman who pulled into his driveway with a load of tools after hearing he had lost all his, and the schoolgirls who arrived to work on his land for a day, helping him move bricks. “It just comes out of the blue and it means a lot,” he says.
Holman and his wife live in a donated portable school building on their property as they rebuild their home and their life. “I’ll hang the portrait on the portable wall,” he laughs.
