Watch This Face - Mia Schoen

The Age

Wednesday November 24, 2004

Michelle Griffin

Artist Mia Schoen is inspired by suburban housing estates. Now an art prize will take her to explore the badlands of south-west America.

On sunny weekends when the rest of Melbourne heads for the coast, Mia Schoen drives her 1977 Honda Civic out to new estates on the fringes of town and photographs the freshly tarmacked streets.

A landscape artist in her third year of study at the Victorian College of the Arts, Schoen, 31, has just won the $10,000 Wallara Travelling Scholarship for her New Estate paintings - the McMansions of Caroline Springs, the bulldozed hills of Gowanbrae, past Tullamarine, and the houses packed along the sand dunes of Joondalup in Perth.

"It's the starkness that makes me interested in painting it," says Schoen.

"Big flat surfaces and the harsh Australian light. That's very attractive, but the environments I find quite isolated and very surreal. It is a big theme and it will keep me going for a long time."

Although she freely acknowledges the twin influences of Jeffrey Smart and Howard Arkley - "what it means to be Australian, those two summed it up pretty nicely" - Schoen's oil paintings are not pop art. The weight of her blue skies seems to squash her houses into the horizon line, and she often sews fields of scrub into the canvas with her old sewing machine.

In June next year, Schoen will travel to California and Arizona to study the massive estates spread across the flatlands of the south-west. "Imagine that completely flat landscape with the huge suburban sprawl," she says happily. "Visually, that'll be pretty exciting to see."

She's hoping to bring her rock band, New Estate, along for a tour. In her other life, Schoen has been playing guitar in Melbourne bands for the past decade, singing in a husky voice over a wash of electric guitars in bands such as Molasses, Huon and Sleepy Township.

"Music and art are very much intertwined," says Schoen, who paints while listening to rough cuts of her recordings. "I don't think I could just do one without the other. Painting is obsessive and it's also really lonely. Music is a very collaborative thing."

Schoen grew up on the edge of a national forest on the eastern outskirts of Perth, the daughter of a driving instructor and a ceramicist who encouraged both their daughters (Mia is the younger) to be creative. Schoen always wanted to be an artist, but she dropped out of her fine arts course in second year, after she was nearly killed by an electric shock from the guitar she was playing in the spare room of a badly wired rental home.

"I was just playing a chord when it hit me. I had time to think, 'I'm going to die now', which was pretty frightening." Recovering in hospital, Schoen decided to quit art school and move to Melbourne with her band. Painting remained a sideline in her new town - Schoen loved to climb onto the roof of her Brunswick home and sketch the roofscape, and her images have decorated the covers of several indy CDs.

Three years ago, she quit her day job as an archivist at the State Library so she could resume her study of art, at VCA. She's also left the inner city. Four months ago, she moved into a three-bedroom brick veneer in Jacana, one of Broadmeadows' 1970s estates, with her husband, David Nichols, a Deakin cultural studies academic better known as the Melbourne muso who wrote a biography of The Go-Betweens.

"Once the trees grow and public transport makes it out there, it's fine," says Schoen. "I don't have a problem with people moving to new estates." It's the

giant homes with no backyards that freak Schoen out. "It diminishes the Australian way of life. Go outside and look at the sky. That's more important

than staying inside." (m)