From sign art to fine art, Narrogin creative Peter Stringer shares what he sees with deft strokes

A sign writer by trade, the keen eye and steady hand of local artist Trevor Stringer has turned to producing smaller but no-less striking work since retirement. Stringer received the people’s choice award for his coloured pencil portrait of a bee at the recent Kulin Community Arts Centre B-themed exhibition and a dedication to detail is evident in the piece. “I always go back to coloured pencils — I’ve been dubbed the coloured pencil specialist,” he laughed. “I don’t know about that, I just enjoy art.” After 53 years in the trade, stepping into art — after a brief hiatus — came naturally to Stringer. “I put the brushes away, didn’t touch them after I retired,” he said. “Then my wife Robyn was talking to Peter Denton from Cuballing and he was running an acrylic painting workshop. “Robyn said ‘do you want to go?’’, I thought ‘do I really need to get my hands dirty again?’ . . . but I went along and the rest is history, we still paint together, that was about three years ago.” Stringer arrived at the easel with a wealth of experience behind him but the transition wasn’t without challenges. “I had to get out of my precise box,” he said. “Loosen up.” Two recent acrylic works, Bush Walk and Walk the Farm, that feature in the Friday Artists Stepping Out exhibition on show now at Nexis, mark a departure for Stringer. “They’re two of the first ones where I really didn’t worry about straight lines, I just painted, broke the mould if you like,” he said. There’s a touch of larrikin about Stringer and he’s happy to talk about the work he does in his adjacent bar-cum-studio with its homage to Australian cartoonist Ken Maynard’s iconic Ettamogah Pub. After 56 years of looking at the wall, Stringer now enjoys looking out over it with brush in hand. “You think wow, that’s incredible,” he said. “Especially with clouds and things like that, sometimes you look up at the sky and think ‘if I painted that no one would believe me.”