Ken Searle is an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 who was born in Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

 and grew up around Cooks River

Cooks River

The Cooks River is a 23 kilometre long urban waterway of south-western Sydney, New South Wales, Australia emptying into Botany Bay. The course of the river has been altered to accommodate various developments along its shore...

 in the south-western suburbs of the city.

Searle is a self-taught artist who began exhibiting

Art exhibition

Art exhibitions are traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is rarely true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or...

 his paintings and drawings in the mid 1970s and has held at least 24 solo exhibitions since. He is known for large, and often whimsical, paintings, in oil

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

 on canvas, of suburban and industrial areas in several Australian cities.

From 1998 to 2001 Searle worked as a consultant at the school in the Aboriginal

Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....

 community of Papunya

Papunya, Northern Territory

Papunya is a small Indigenous Australian community of about 299 people roughly 240 km northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Australia...

 in central Australia, the place where the Western Desert Art Movement

Papunya Tula

Papunya Tula, or Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, is an artist cooperative formed in 1972 that is owned and operated by Aboriginal people from the Western Desert of Australia. The group is known for its innovative work with the Western Desert Art Movement, popularly referred to as "dot painting"...

 originated. During his time there he produced many works depicting the local landscape

Landscape art

Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...

.

Searle has also collaborated with writer Nadia Wheatley

Nadia Wheatley

Nadia Wheatley is an award winning Australian writer of children’s fiction and non-fiction, adult non-fiction and biographies, and newspaper and journal articles. Her works often focus on "the difficulties faced by Aborigines or non-English-speaking newcomers to Australia, ... environmental issues...

on the production of two books, Papunya School Book of Country and History, and Going Bush.