Design and Art Australia Online

Latje Latje painter Trevor “Turbo” Brown was born in Mildura, Victoria in 1967. An intellectually disabled man, Trevor was homeless and suffered from neglect for a number of years in his youth. In 1982 he was 'adopted’ by Uncle Herb and Aunty Bunta who ran a Koorie Hostel in Greensborough, Melbourne. Brown flourished under their care, taking up boxing, rapping and breakdancing – it was at this time that he acquired the nickname “Turbo”, after one of the protagonists in the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin’ . It is the name he now uses when signing his paintings. In 2001 he began a Diploma of Arts (Visual Arts) at RMIT’s Bundoora Campus, which he completed in 2005. During this time he began painting animal scenes from his experience and his imagination. Brown’s work was included in a number of group exhibitions in Melbourne while he was still a student, and he held his first solo exhibition 'Turbo Brown’ at the Koorie Heritage Trust in 2004.
Brown’s paintings, which he describes generally as his “Latje Latje Dreaming”, articulate his strong sense of affinity with the animals of the Australian bush. The reasons for his devotion to this subject matter are presented in Carolyn Webb’s article “Turbo-charged look at animal world” published in The Age (2005), in which she recounts that Brown once told Uncle Herb that 'when he was 15 and living on the Mildura streets and the Murray River bank, the animals were his only friends.’ His brightly coloured works, made with synthetic polymer paint, have a rough, painterly quality, and his sense of empathy with his subjects is conveyed in their expressive faces and the way they fill the pictorial space.
Brown has held solo exhibitions at the Koorie Heritage Trust and Australian Dreaming Art in Melbourne, and Rex Livingston Art Dealer in Sydney. Important group exhibitions have included the 22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award at the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory (2005), 'Landmarks’, curated by Judith Ryan and Stephen Gilchrist, at the National Gallery of Victoria (2006), and 'Culture Warriors’, the inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial curated by Brenda Croft at the National Gallery of Australia (2007).

Writers:

Fisher, Laura

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011