Russell Drysdale never painted out of doors – he gathered his imagery in drawings and photographs and constructed his paintings through the filters of memory and imagination. Drysdale condensed the iconography in Man feeding his dogs from the years he spent in the Riverina district of New South Wales, but he painted the artwork in his Sydney studio. 

He has taken the horizon line down notably low in this painting, effectively providing a ‘dog's-eye view’ of the world. The origin of this compositional device may lie in Drysdale’s extensive use of the camera: photographs imply a deep foreground, little mid-ground and a background that merges into the horizon. Drysdale suggested the principal figure in this painting ‘was one of those people who could have been a rabbiter on a property or . . . an employee whose job it was to look after the station dogs’.