AustLit

'Carment is one of Australia’s best-known plein air artists. It is his distinctive mark as a writer that he writes as he paints – from life – capturing the likeness of a particular place in time, remaining faithful to the moment when he sees something striking or strange. And just as his paintings and drawings are small, limited by what he can carry with him on his travels, so in his writing he is a miniaturist working on a large scale: the tone of his writing matches the style of his brushwork. Free-flowing yet nuanced, it evokes the places he visits and the people and objects he encounters, friends and strangers, the homeless and the famous – farms, beaches, cottages, building sites, even typewriters and eggs and telegraph poles – each has its story.

'In this richly illustrated collection of Tom Carment’s essays about people and landscapes has been thirty years in the making. It covers the period that he has lived in Womerah Lane in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, while travelling the country as a plein air artist. Womerah Lane is composed of written pieces set in every state of mainland Australia, accompanied by paintings and drawings made in those places.'

Source: Publisher's work.

'Over their weekly conversation in an inner-city cafe, photographer Michael Wee persuaded his friend, painter and writer Tom Carment, to embark on some walks into 'wild' Australia. Inexperienced long-distance bushwalkers, Michael and Tom learned en route as they traversed hot, rainy, snow-covered, and bushfire-blackened terrain. Alongside Michael's aaunting, dramatic photographs, and Tom's delicately observed watercolours and drawings are stories of each walk, interweaving history with anecdote, humour with observation. Seven Walks is the companion book to their adventures and captures the feeling of heading out on foot along a narrow track, into a beautiful landscape. ' (Publication summary)