Australian Wall Art

This is the whole lot, close to two hundred works, and every one of them comes off a single coastline. I'm Richard Hirst, and most people around here call me Hirsty. I've spent decades photographing the stretch of New South Wales that runs from Palm Beach in the north, down past the eastern beaches, plus the harbour that cuts into the middle of it, and I'm not a travel photographer passing through on a fortnight's trip. I live here, I swim here, and I shoot the same places over and over until they finally give me something.

Not that there's anything wrong with a red rock or a gum tree, which is what Australian wall art usually means, but mine is salt water. It's the sandstone shelf running under the eastern beaches and out to the headlands, the tidal pools cut into that shelf a century ago, the harbour and its working boats sitting in a drowned river valley, and the particular grey green the ocean turns off Maroubra once a southerly has been blowing for two days.

I'm a represented artist at YellowKorner, which carries sixteen of my works and describes me as one of Australia's leading landscape photographers, and I take commissions from corporate clients as well.

So if you already know what you want, the collections split all this up by place and by subject. And if you haven't a clue, start with the ocean pools, because that's the work I'm best known for, and it's what I'd put in front of you first if you turned up at the studio on a Tuesday. Everything else here grew out of standing about on wet rock at five in the morning, waiting for a pool to fill, getting it wrong, and going back.

If you want to narrow it down: coastal wall art gathers everything shot at the water's edge, the ocean pools have their own page, and the beaches run north through the Northern Beaches from Manly to Newport or east to Bondi, Bronte and Coogee. Buying for somebody else, or not sure which beach is theirs, is what Australiana gifts is for.