In Rob McHaffie’s playful work, you may recognise the outlines of familiar people and places. Across painting, ceramic sculpture, collage and works on paper, the artist splashes colour and humour into everyday scenes. From elegant women with jacketed greyhounds to NGV buskers and families at the beach, McHaffie captures it all.

“I’m trying to encapsulate the spirit of real people,” he says. “Whether it’s someone I’ve encountered or someone close to me, I’m always formulating a picture from someone that I know, and how their life or life experience influences me … [The artworks] exist parallel to real life.”

Born and raised in Melbourne, McHaffie began his artistic career in the early 2000s, driven by a fascination with understanding other people through observation. His work takes stylistic inspiration from John Brack and David Hockney, as well as culturally from his wife’s Thai heritage.

Moving to Castlemaine with his young family in 2020 gave the artist even more to draw from. “I started considering things that I hadn’t felt licensed to consider, like painting the Australian landscape,” he says. “The more recent paintings bring in a fair bit of Castlemaine’s landscape and identity, and the type of person that I encounter around town … The culture of the place is quite subtle, but kind of permeates everything.”

All of this coalesces in McHaffie’s biggest exhibition yet. We Are Family is spread out across five rooms at Bendigo Art Gallery and broken into thematic sections: family and home, urban landscapes, portraits, ceramics and diaristic sketches.

“There is so much great artistic talent in our region and Rob has been on our radar for a while,” says curator Emma Busowsky. “His work is clever while also being accessible … I love that his observations have a distinctive local element … [and] also express something quite universal.”

As a Castlemaine local and single mother herself, Busowsky especially relates to McHaffie’s painting Single mums at the Res (after Hermann Corrodi). The piece depicts women and children playing and bathing at Expedition Pass Reservoir, a popular swimming hole at nearby Golden Point. It reinterprets the late 19th-century Italian painter Corrodi’s Ladies of the Harem Bathing, which is also in the Bendigo collection; modernising that scene, McHaffie turns it into a bright celebration of community.

“The original … is a sensational painting in terms of looking at women,” McHaffie says. “I wanted to draw it back to Castlemaine and pitch it around the local area … We do have a lot of young, strong female role models around town that run local small businesses and support each other doing fun things for the kids.”