Melbourne-born figurative artist and ceramicist Rob McHaffie takes a global view of human idiosyncrasy. His biggest exhibition to date, We Are Family, mostly covers the 46-year-old’s past 10 years of painting; the street life of commuters, dog walkers and hipsters in his adopted tree-change home in Castlemaine, in central Victoria, where he lives with his wife, Nartchanok (“Nok”), who is a chef, and their two young children.
There are some earlier works, too: a Henri Rousseau-inspired 2012 piece called The Night We Met Was Wild, featuring Nartchanok in a jungle, hangs next to Nok in the Street in Carnegie, from 2018, depicting her against a brick wall with a child after the couple had eaten dumplings in the Melbourne suburb.
“It’s a nice gap in time,” McHaffie laughs. The pair met at a film launch in Thailand, after McHaffie took up an Asialink residency in Malaysia at Rimbun Dahan in Kuang, near Kuala Lumpur, in 2011. “There was a little bit of flirting and dancing that night,” he recalls. They fell in love on a subsequent trip to Bali.
A couple of Matisse-inspired gauche works depict their first child, born in Bangkok. Collage-based works come from the same period, when McHaffie would cut up Thai Vogue magazines and recompose them to make pictures of people who struck him during their time in the capital, such as a homeless man who watched the traffic all day. “I love eccentricities; they wake up my heart a bit,” he says. “I might do a journal drawing, perhaps a watercolour, and if they’re still with me, I’ll compose a painting out of it.”
Rob McHaffie: We Are Family
Bendigo Art Gallery
On now—9 February 2025
This article was originally published in the November/December 2024 print issue of Art Guide Australia.
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