Fat Bogans & Servo Piety

Phil Brew
May 3 - 24, 2025

About Fat Bogans & Servo Piety

This series of paintings is a personal response to my twelve years working in service stations around Lismore. Early on, I focused on the violence I encountered—both on the job and in the broader culture. I was struck by how justified the perpetrators often felt, especially in the aftermath of their actions. Cruelty, I’ve come to think, is an indulgence we mask with stories, politics, ideologies, or outrage at one another’s differences.

During the COVID crisis, I sensed a shift in society, and my memory often returns to the images of cruelty. For example, an elderly woman lying prone in the street as two police officers pepper-sprayed her face. The haloed human figures in these works represent a post-COVID world—more sanctimonious, less tolerant. Their religiosity underscores a modern kind of moral posturing, while the medieval grotesques echo how, despite the Enlightenment, we remain driven by fear handed down from authority.

While the search for meaning and connection is admirable, life rarely offers neat moral resolutions. In the end, it won’t matter who was right or wrong, but how we treated one another along the way.

Phil Brew

About Phil Brew

Phil Brew is a painter originally from the southwestern suburbs of Sydney, who has lived in Lismore for the past 21 years. His work is rooted in the tradition of Gestural Expressionism and presents the complex realities of life on Lismore’s streets with a distinctive blend of violence playfulness, mysticism, and refined levity.