Sandy McLean closes Tambo art exhibition with paint party

Known as the Outback Artist, Sandy returned to her bush stomping ground with her works featuring well-known vibrant bird paintings, but added some of the Wild West’s female sharpshooters to spice it up.

Good friend, Virginia Wacker, said she was not only an accomplished artist but an accomplished horsewoman.

“She knows sheep and she knows how to drive a dozer,” she told the opening night audience, reminding them that Sandy has previously exhibited at the Agora Gallery in New York.

Thanks to her years of living on cattle properties she has experienced the distress and loss that drought can bring to rural people, and so a share of sales made at the Tambo exhibition was donated to the Black Dog Institute, an organisation that’s dedicated to understanding, preventing and treating mental illness.

Ironically, Carol’s exhibition opening earlier in the year was all but washed out by a huge deluge of rain.

Growing up west of Hughenden, Carol has lived for over 40 years with her family on a cattle property near Glenmorgan, and is often referred to these days as the “car boot” artists, creating many of her paintings in her car as she travels.

Carol too likes to help rural people who run into trouble, and profits from sales are directed to various charities providing transport and accommodation for seriously ill patients and their families.

After the paint party, Sandy’s work will be making way for an exhibition by Brisbane portrait artist, Penelope Gilbert-Ng, titled Country Moments, that will be running from August 6 to September 30.