A CABINET of Curiosities is Coffs Harbour artist John Thiering’s new solo exhibition, showing at the National Cartoon Gallery at The Bunker with opening night on Friday 13 October.

Featuring 30-40 works, most of them new, the exhibition provides the viewer with a treasure trove of stories filled with oddities and steeped in whimsy.

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“I see my paintings a little bit like poems in that they are not necessarily logical, they have a quirkiness and a humour, with elements of the absurd,” said John, who told NOTA the works in this exhibition are influenced by his reading of the book Flights by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The book is filled with beautifully told stories of the 1600s and 1700s including tales about collections of wonders and oddities of the natural world.

“I’m always interested in quirky things.

“Like the way a dream unfolds.

“I’ve always dreamt a lot and find a lot of power in dreams.

“When people try to understand a painting, to me it’s like trying to understand a dream.

“You’re riding backwards on a camel on roller-skates…you can’t understand it.”

For John the creative part of painting is about conjuring feeling.

He uses the experience of the dream to recreate the emotions he was feeling while asleep – “the fears or desires or whatever”.

There’s also a crossover between humans and animals in his works.

There might be a character on all fours, behaving like an animal, and sometimes you’ll see animals behaving like humans.

“That’s the history of cartooning and comic books,” he said.

“In religions and mythology since the dawn of time human storytelling has merged animals with humans.

“I’m just continuing that tradition in my own way.

“I think it’s a great way to comment about the human condition by looking at it through placing us in a sort of close proximity to animals.”

With the paintings busy with these peculiar people and their less-than-usual behaviour John describes the process of the picture coming to life.

“I start by painting the background – whether it be a landscape or an interior space – the context and then the characters emerge from out of the ground of the painting; they might suddenly appear which amuses me, and I do wonder where they came from, some are old friends reappearing, which can also surprise me.”

John likens that part of the process to a novelist writing stories that include past characters in new stories.

To explain more he uses the example of a current painting.

He started with the context of a circus.

Creating the arena, the energy builds when you start to introduce marks that will become the characters, who then begin to emerge like they belong there.

“The place comes first, then out of that place the characters grow, they reveal themselves as I’m painting like I’m having a dialogue with the paint.”

John’s medium is acrylic on canvas with works ranging in size from two metres wide down to “fairly small”.

On opening night John will present a live performance, details of which he is keeping up his sleeve.

John has been painting all his life, with his first exhibition in Sydney in 1987.

While painting is his first love, he has become well-known for his extraordinary performances as a sand artist, made famous after his successful performance on Australia’s Got Talent in 2022.

For more details on John visit the John Thiering Art Facebook page or johnthieringart.com.

By Andrea FERRARI