Kayak

A red kayak has been fitted out with a smokestack, a bit of machinery and a small windshield, and now it puffs along above a hillside like a steam launch that forgot about water. A boy in a white shirt sits at the controls, hands on the wheel, sailing past dark cypress trees and a farmhouse toward a bank of rocky outcrops. Down on the grass to the right, another small figure kneels beside what looks like a toy version of the same craft. That detail changes the whole picture: is the flying kayak real, or is it what the child on the ground is imagining?

The painter is Shaun Tan, an Australian artist better known for his wordless picture book The Arrival and for winning an Academy Award for the animated short The Lost Thing. Alongside his book work he paints in oils, and this canvas shows his usual habit of dropping an impossible machine into a perfectly ordinary landscape without explaining it. The low sun turns the dirt track orange and flattens the distant town into a smudge on the horizon, a warm dusk light that Australian painters like Jeffrey Smart and Rick Amor used for their own strange, empty scenes. Tan's brushwork here is loose and slightly worn, which suits a painting about make believe more than a polished surface would.