ARTIST Michael Jones has lived all over the world, but said Broken Hill has always dragged him back.
The painter has just opened a gallery in the Kidman’s Family Butchers shop in Silverton, where he spends his days painting in the front window.
Jones first came to Broken Hill back in 1988, when he was working as a police officer.
“I came with another police officer and we were on motorbikes and travelled to all the schools in the district, doing road safety awareness for three weeks,” he said.
“Then in 1989, I transferred and moved here with my wife and kids. After about six months my wife didn’t like Broken Hill so she moved back.”
Not long after, Jones returned to Sydney, and then spent the next 20 years moving around, living in Queensland, Derby in Tasmania, and even Indonesia.
In 2020, he returned to Broken Hill and about six weeks ago he started selling his paintings from the Butcher Shop in Silverton, where he can be found painting most days.
Many of the photos he works from are from when visited in the 1990s and spent time out in the bush with local artist Clark Barrett.
“He and I used to go out bush, and we’d go for a week at a time and paint,” Jones said.
“I’m still painting photographs that I took back then when I first lived out here. There’s a painting up that was from when Clark and I were sat on top of a hill waiting over an hour for the sun to go below the clouds. So you can see the light – we were just running around trying to get all this information when the light was right, and I’ve still got all those photos.”
Jones said he’s been painting ever since he was about nine years old, and the process for him is more enjoyable than the outcome.
“The thing is I actually really love pushing the paint around and creating it,” he said.
“After it’s finished I don’t really care what happens to it. I’ve done my bit. I’m painting for me, I’m not painting for anybody else. And I’m just lucky that people like my stuff and pay me money to look at it all the time.”
Jones said he tries to paint whether he’s feeling inspired or not.
“There’s a quote that says, ‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working,’” he said.
