On My Way to Paradise

Artwork: Shaun Tan, The Silent Sea, pastel on paper

Shaun Tan is a brilliant artist, illustrator and storyteller. I’ve read many of his books such as The Red Tree, The Lost Thing and The Arrival, and I often dip into his book of sketches and thoughts, The Bird King, for inspiration. Tan has an upcoming solo exhibition in late April at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne titled On My Way to Paradise. Here is one of the works on paper to be featured, The Silent Sea. The drawing was created without a written story, beginning with a boy making a travel companion out of a sack of rice. This is the wonderful imaginative world in which Tan inhabits.