| Bud Stephenson & his wife Lana, abandoned city life where they ran their signwriting & commercial art business for 36 years.
Both professional musicians performing in bands in Wollongong & Sydney it became clear that a "tempo & tree change" be the medicine they craved.
Driving through states & ever changing country, it was divine intervention & a thunderstorm that pitched them under the veranda of the then empty "Old Black Rock Hotel" in the Southern Flinders Ranges.
Three months later saw them as excited new owners!
An immediate conversion was made & for 6 years they operated a restaurant & coffee lounge known as the "Black Rock Art & Coffee Palace".
Bud has been painting now seriously & exhibiting in the mid north for 16 years where his style has changed from traditional realist to a more modern abstractional style. The chains that bind have been cast off & he has taken on a new found freedom. Staying with the rules of form, space, light & shade, he is able to hold control over the chaotic, highly textured depictions of a Flinders organic,rugged underworld.
Bud says......"Living in & painting this ancient buckled seabed, transforms itself into a gigantic gnarled abstract dragon lizard in a majestic landscape like no other". |
