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Exhibition dates: 28 May-16 June 2019 Australian Galleries Melbourne, 35 Derby Street, Collingwood In 1977 Rodney Forbes was working as a missile systems technician with the Department of Navy. The Vietnam War had wound out to its inglorious conclusion and, disillusioned, he resigned and set off overland across Asia with his wife Rouvé. Encountering civil war in Afghanistan and worsening anti-Western feeling in Iran, they washed up penniless in punk-era London, where Forbes worked as an electronic game machine technician and haunted its art galleries. After a year in England, the pair set off back to Australia via Sri Lanka and Forbes says he can remember the exact moment, on a bumpy bus ride near Colombo, when Rouvé encouraged him to follow his dream of becoming a painter. Back in Australia Forbes enrolled at the legendary Gippsland School of Art, with 24-hour access, no grades and no crit sessions. Three months after finishing, he exhibited his paintings at the Victorian Ministry of the Arts Foyer Gallery in Melbourne. Stuart Purves, from Melbourne’s oldest commercial art gallery, Australian Galleries, spotted the show and invited Forbes to include some works in the gallery’s stock room. A few years later, the gallery gave him his first solo exhibition. The walls were still hot from Australian icon Sidney Nolan’s show, and Forbes says, “It’s hard to describe the nervousness occasioned by hanging as an emerging artist on the same walls as your artistic hero and the greatest painter Australia has produced.” Rodney Forbes’ debut show was a surprise success and he is now mounting his seventeenth solo show at the gallery, in the same room that he inherited from Nolan 30 years ago, “My paintings honour the ways in which people tell stories and the poetry in everyday life” he says, “and that is something I very much admired about Nolan.” CHOICE LANGUAGE is current until 16 June 2019.