KOGARAH artist Steve Lopes would like Sydney to know there is great beauty and creativity in suburbia, and it was Clive James who showed him that.
Lopes, 43, began reading James when he was a student at Marist College Kogarah.
He relished the passages he would find squirrelled away in the pages that referenced and described his own suburb and its surrounds: the park at the end of James' childhood street, Margaret Street, where Lopes would play sport; Kogarah station (deliciously described in a sarcastic passage as "the height of Sydney's architectural achievement, beating even the Harbour Bridge"), and the Ramsgate Baths where James would "dive bomb near the edge of the pool to drench the girls, do mildly difficult acrobatic tricks, smoke and comb my hair".
"He added a kind of magic to these places," says Lopes, who still lives in the area — proudly.
"The suburbs are a hotbed of creativity. Most of the artists I know were born in the suburbs, including Clive, not in Darlinghurst. For him, the mindset to become a great writer was formed right here in Kogarah."
Lopes is working on a show that will be an ode to both the boy from Kogarah and the suburb that made him: 15 drawings of James, 20 plein air paintings of the area and more paintings based on historical photos of local places mentioned in James' writing, taken at the time the writer lived there.
Lopes found the photos with the help of a researcher at Kogarah Library, where the exhibition will open in September, before moving to the State Library of NSW.
Lopes has been in contact with James through the writer's close friend director Bruce Beresford (the brother of one of Lopes' friends), but is yet to meet him in person.
However, the novelty of James' name in his email inbox is yet to wear off.
He had hoped to meet for a cup of tea in London after a recent painting and research trip to Gallipoli with other Australian artists, musicians and writers commissioned to produce work for next year's Anzac Day centenary, but James had been too ill.
The writer, who suffers from advanced leukaemia and emphysema, will make what is expected to be his last appearance in an hour-long talk at the inaugural Australia & NZ Festival of Literature & Arts in London on Saturday.
He will never return to Sydney.
"I heard from Bruce that Clive is quite melancholic," Lopes says.
"He wishes he could come back and see Kogarah for the last time and the places he grew up.
"These things I'm painting now are things I take for granted. He won't see them again."
