Riding Road

A reworking of Debra's well-known Sentinels on Riding Road (c. 2016)

Riding Road is a picturesque tree-lined thoroughfare running from Wynnum Road, Morningside to Oxford Street, Bulimba. Lining each side of the road are 60-year-old, Melaleuca quinquenervia, or paperbark trees. These were planted to create a pleasantly themed road at a time when Riding Road was parted with a tramline. Like giant sentinels, these trees have kept watch over locals for generations, providing a shaded sidewalk for school children, strollers, and dogwalkers alike. Their ugliness is their beauty; their peeling, shredded bark reveals a gallery of magnificent patterns and colours and their creamy brush blossoms confuse us with their sickly-sweet honey scent. As one side of the road hosts power poles with wires running through the paperbarks, the trees receive an unflattering and savage prune directly through the canopy center, this operation is known by local families as the “Telstra Haircut”.

Debra's signature style is reflected in Riding Road, with numerous small details, such as dogs and birds, scattered throughout the artwork.

Follow

With 30 years experience as an artist, Debra Hood is a Brisbane local who paints colour-filled Queenslanders surrounded by nature reimagined as explosions of whimsical colour. She specialises in intricate, colourful and detail cityscapes that capture the romantic essence of inner-city Brisbane suburbs.

She began by painting window-framed scenes with near expansive white cloth nappies on a clothesline obscuring the view of the world – a reflection of the struggles of raising three young children and leading an insular domestic life with little time for creativity.

As her children grew, so did her love and appreciation of Queensland architecture, and thus her artwork transformed to be a celebration of domestic life within the beautiful suburbs of Brisbane and the joyful creative challenge of resolving the placement of clashing colours and patterns alongside one another.

Over time, the foliage of her paintings because more dotted, mirroring the Brisbane springtime when the blossoms of Jacaranda, Poinciana, Pink Trumpet and Golden Penda trees fall en masse, like confetti, to create a multicoloured carpet that is today featured in her paintings surrounding the iconic Queenslander houses. Her aim is to bring joy to the viewer, and a sense of childhood nostalgia as they search to find tiny hidden secrets amongst the foliage or daydream about life inside the houses.

Debra is dedicated to her local art community and founded the Southside Art Market in 2016 to give local artists a platform and support. Her work can be spotted on many murals and traffic signal boxes around the city, including the sculptural kookaburra installation at Paddington and, until recently, even a City Cat.

Debra is passionate about preserving Brisbane’s iconic domestic architecture and believes what she calls “bland beige architecture” is changing how we live and engage as a community. Her work is a loving documentation of the variety of Queenslander homes and their charming architectural detail and heritage.