"John Dyer's use of colour and the animals and plants he has featured in his pictures are fantastic. They are just like Banrock; the more you look the more you discover!"
Tony Sharley Manager of Banrock Station Wine. 2006
Early in 2006, John had an opportunity to observe another crop in a very different geographical location when he spent a week as Artist in Residence at Banrock Station in South Australia. This came about because Banrock Station’s parent company Hardy Wines (now Accolade Wines) was the main supplier of wine for corporate and fund-raising events at Eden. Everyone knows about Banrock Station’s wines, but it is less widely known that the land on which the vines are grown was once a dry wasteland on which nothing much could grow, due to the installation of locks on the nearby River Murray in 1923 which led to a degradation of the land. The programme of environmental restoration which began in the early 1990s has not only reinstated the sustainable eco-system of the wetland complex enabling the vines to flourish but has also attracted back to the area a wealth of wildlife, including the greater bilby (an endangered marsupial), which had not been seen there for decades.
John’s paintings are as much a celebration of the regeneration of this internationally important ecological site as they are about the cultivation of the vines. Tony Sharley, the Manager of Banrock Station, who flew in from Australia to open John’s exhibition at Eden as well as provide commentary for each painting’s caption, paid tribute to this when he said that John managed to combine the vastness of the Australian landscape and the lives of tiny ants with equal conviction.
All of the Australian paintings are also available as limited edition prints.
Discover John Dyer's and other artists' paintings of Cornwall.
