Instead of carting around reams of drawings, paintings and etchings, a conflagration allowed Wallace-Crabbe to focus on the creative process.

He kept just the pieces he liked most, or which had the most meaning.

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A selection of these will soon be on display gallery the Left Hand, in a retrospective show that is a survey of Wallace-Crabbe’s 60 years as an artist.

Wallace-Crabbe began exhibiting aged 18, and is now nearly 80. Born in Melbourne, he has lived with his wife Virginia Wallace-Crabbe in Braidwood since 1979.

He began with painting at an early age, encouraged by an artistic father, and just kept exploring.

As well as visual art, Wallace-Crabbe wrote a series of novels, published under a variety of names. About a forger, the novels connect with the technicality of art production.

Regularly starting afresh has allowed Wallace-Crabbe to focus on the experience of making art. Rather than the finished product, he is forced into new perspectives.

“It expands the makers idea of meaning, and the relationship between images and images, and how there’s a lot of reinterpretation,” Wallace-Crabbe said.

Similarly, he is proud to have never found a style and stuck with it.

Instead, he has experimented with style, with medium, with ideas. From abstract to realistic, Wallace-Crabbe has always tried to explores the different ways of expressing an idea.

“One of the things that I think my work has avoided is arriving on a style and then fixing on it for the rest of myself,” he said.

“I think that turns art into just a manufactured set of objects, whereas, I like the idea that when you start each new painting, you’re going on a new and fresh journey.”

Works in the show at the Left Hand range in media from paintings, to drawing on paper, to pastels and even one sculpture, spanning from the 1960s to the present.

One of the first works in the show provides a window into what his art is about, says Wallace-Crabbe.

It is pastel drawing of his children, standing with their mother and a pet rabbit which has decently died. It sets the tone for a art which is personal, normally focusing on human subjects.

“There’s always been an autobiographical aspect to what I paint,” he said.

“I tend to put human beings in a lot of them: so part of the subject is the human beings, and the absurdity of our being in a sort of way.”

For Wallace-Crabbe creating art isn’t just about the serious process of expression of serious ideas, it’s fun.

“Art is, partly it’s very important and serious… but it’s also a lovely way of playing, you’re playing with ideas,” he said.

“I guess mainly it’s also about escaping the world of language, and going into this other world, which is the silence of looking.”