Tim Storrier keeps sending the same man into the desert. He wears a pale suit and a hat, and where his face should be there is nothing at all. Everything else about him is loaded on: paint boxes, brushes, rolled canvases, a palette, a water bag, sometimes a scarf whipping off in the wind.
The man is Storrier, more or less. The Australian painter has been walking him across empty plains under enormous skies since at least 2011, and nearly everything you need to know about him is in what he carries.
A self-portrait with no face
The wanderer made Storrier’s name a second time. In 2012 he won the Archibald Prize, Australia’s best-known portrait award, with The Histrionic Wayfarer (after Bosch), a self-portrait in which you never see the sitter. He borrowed the idea from The Wayfarer, painted by Hieronymus Bosch around 1510, a ragged traveler with a pack on his back who may be choosing which road to take.
Storrier swapped the pack for a painter’s kit and added a dog. His argument was that you don’t need a face to know someone, because the clothes and the gear give them away. And in the painting, a scrap of paper blows off in the wind with a sketch of his real face on it. The judges were split between him and Jenny Sages. He won anyway! A life-size bronze of the wayfarer now stands on the campus of Bond University in Queensland.
Five hundred years apart, same road. After the win, the wayfarer kept walking, and his load kept growing.
Dauber, Splotcher, Impedimenta
Read his titles and a running joke shows up. A dauber is an old word for a bad painter, someone who just slaps it on, and Speed Dauber is the wanderer in a hurry. The Splotcher, who turns up in the early 2020s, takes it further: a faceless painter in a pointed red dunce cap, pushing on with a brush held out in front of him. He’s widely read as a stand-in for Storrier himself.
Then there’s impedimenta, a word he comes back to again and again. It’s Latin for baggage, especially the heavy kind an army has to drag along behind it. So the hero of these paintings is a clumsy painter, buried in his own gear, walking toward somewhere he never quite reaches. That’s a funny way for one of Australia’s most decorated living painters to see himself!
Storrier’s own notes put the wanderer in older company: Atlas holding up the sky, Sisyphus and his boulder, the swagman of the Australian bush, tramping from one station to the next. He doesn’t get grand about it, though. “I may be painting pre Modernist pictures, maybe, I hope so,” he writes.
Yes, that last one is the Splotcher falling out of the sky head first, brushes and all. Poor guy.
Where the wanderer goes missing
In plenty of the paintings he never shows up at all. You get his things instead, set down in the desert as if he just walked out of frame and might be back in a minute.
In The Ulster Lounge, it’s a green tufted sofa, sitting alone on a flat plain under a sky that takes up most of the canvas. Nobody is coming to sit on it.
In Equine Impedimenta (Tully’s Baggage), a horse stands nearly buried under a load of bundles. The painter’s luggage made it into the picture. The painter didn’t.
The Arcadian Repose is the biggest of the bunch, three meters across. Here the baggage has finally been dropped, and it’s everywhere: papers, tools, a chair, scraps lifting off across the sand. A few years later he came back to it for Notes from the Arcadian Repose, a strip three meters long that adds an old television test pattern to the wreckage.
And some of it is just night. The Celestial Bowl, a small painting from 2023, is a dish holding a sky full of stars, which is about as close as Storrier gets to a still life.
Fire came first
Before the wanderer there was fire. Storrier made his name with burning lines: out in remote stretches of the outback, he’d string a rope or wire between two posts, set it alight and paint the glowing line against the evening. He photographed them too, and the photographs are works in their own right. Burning ropes and logs are still the hallmark of his work, and they keep drifting into the newer paintings!
He started young. Born in Sydney in 1949 and raised near Wellington in country New South Wales, he won the Sulman Prize in 1968 at 19, the youngest winner it had ever had, and won it again in 1984. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired several of his works after a London show in 1983. He’s 77 now, lives in Bowral in the Southern Highlands, and his 2025 show in Brisbane added pelicans to the cast.
You don’t need a museum to own a piece of the journey. Storrier sells limited edition prints and small bronzes through his own site, and he’s represented by Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Australian Galleries in Sydney. He posts new work on Instagram.
For more faces that go missing on purpose, see how Serhii Fett removes the head in his portraits, wander through the most surreal art we’ve ever featured, or start with our guide to the most extraordinary paintings and illustrations.
Via Inspiration Grid.
