Art imitates life

As a kid, Randall Sinnamon would play for hours in the Woollamia bush that is now part of Trinity’s Field Studies Centre on the NSW south coast. 

As a boarder, he travelled to Sydney to live and study at the main Summer Hill campus in the 1980s. 

As a grown-up artist, he went back to live at Woollamia and found that he loved his boyhood bushland more than ever. 

So much that he expressed his deep attachment in a magnificent painting, entitled Woollamia Sunset. The painting has now followed its creator’s path. 

It travelled to Sydney to feature in an ambitious School exhibition involving eight Trinity Old Boys who had gone on to become professional artists. 

Woollamia Sunset thus became a Trinity “boarder”, too, residing in the Delmar Gallery on campus at Summer Hill for the duration of the exhibition before returning to Woollamia. 

So in Randall’s case, art really did imitate life, making the same round trip between two Trinity fixtures. 

“Woollamia was where I grew up,” said the 2023 Archibald Prize finalist, whose studio is nearby at Jervis Bay. 

“I would ride my bike all around the property where the School is now. It was the place I used to retreat to. I still live there. My dad lives near the entry, and I’m two minutes up the road.” 

When he attended the opening of the Field Studies Centre 2017 he had to rub his eyes. 

“Suddenly there was a school band there at my old bush retreat, and lots of students wearing ties. It was surreal.” 

“Surreal” was the word many of the Old Boy artists used to describe seeing their works on display at their alma mater. 

The exhibition, entitled From Near and Far, spanned the work of artists who graduated from Trinity between 1967 and 2004. It included painting, printmaking, photography, ceramics, video, and sculpture and featured works by Greg Hyde (’67), Gary Woods (’67 dec.), Henry Lewis (’75), Randall Sinnamon (’87), Anthony Springford (’93), Andrei Davidoff (’00), Hamish Campbell (’03), and Sach Catts (’04).

This article originally appeared in our June 2024 Edition of Trinity News which you can view on our online digital bookshelf.