Perth Voice Interactive

He was a university student at the tender age of 16 but Don Waters was never destined to remain in his chosen profession.

“I was the world’s worst accountant,” he says, his energy and love of life resonating down the blower, charging an otherwise dull day with colour and carrying this listener along with his enthusiasm.

Waters had turned up for his first job in a bank wearing red pants and a multi-coloured fruit motif tie: “The manager took one look and sent me home.”

He returned in yellow savile-stitched trousers and the manager surrendered, as there was nothing in Waters’ wardrobe suitable to the grey world of banking.

“I was always a bower bird, collecting colours,” the now-62-year-old reflects with a chuckle.

He’d always dabbled at the edges of the art world but it was his second wife who threw out the challenge to take it up professionally.

“She urged me to do it full time—or stop talking about it.”

He still remembers cancelling his last client 30 years ago, “with fear, excitement and every emotion you can think of”.

But of course Waters established a successful career in the art world—albeit with dark paintings that prophesise the end of the world.

“[Frightening] stuff, with towers sticking out of the beach.”

Many of his works are vivid scenes of iconic WA landmarks

His career really took off in 2009 after 9/11, when he vowed never again to paint negative imagery.

“I thought ‘why am I paining this stuff when it’s in the news every night?’. It consumes us.”

Exploring Arcadia is Waters’ latest exhibition, a collection of gloriously colourful images celebrating the “bright side of life”.

Arcadia is associated with bountiful, natural splendour and harmony, inhabited by people living without the pride and avarice that corrupts civilisation, Waters says.

Some works are pure escapism, an imagined world: One is a home/ship created in a floating tree wearing a top hat, its foliage a mix of purple jacaranda and red of the tropical poinciana.

With a brother and his family in Perth, Waters is a regular visitor and reckons the city is like an old friend, or “a pair of old slippers”.

So it’s no surprise many of his works are vivid scenes of iconic WA landmarks, such as Cottesloe beach

The sea heaves with a colourful mix of swimmers and sea life, while the old Indiana Tearooms have Waters’ trademark red door. That motif came unbidden into his artworks, but Waters has since discovered it’s a lucky sign in many cultures, including Ireland where people would paint their door red when they’d paid their mortgage.

“It’s welcoming, a safe haven and friendliness,” Waters say.

These days his works can be found around the world, including the Queen’s private collection, which has two.

As well as turning out an impressive volume of work, Waters and his wife are well connected to their small community of Jacobs Well in Queensland.

Waters is president of the PCYC, the Progress Associations and the local Environ Education Centre. He also teaches art and says the most important lesson he passes to students is “to remember you paint for yourself”.

Exploring Arcadia is on at Linton and Kay Galleries, 137 St George’s Terrace, Perth until November 21.