The Secret- day ten

The oranges got another coat of paint: reddish orange on one side of the fruit, cadmium orange in the middle section, orangey yellow on the other edge. Looking forward to painting in the small green stars where the stalk connects and dab-dab-dabbing thousands of texture dots for the peel. Really, I should consider outsourcing this part of the painting process to child labour. The leaves also got another couple of coats of paint today, the shapes are a bit more convincing now, and the cat and dog are starting to form up.

More things to fix: boy’s front leg is wonky; dog’s front leg is a tad rubbery; girl’s hands are claw-like; owls need more substance and golden colours in the plumage (I want them to be magnicent!); and the girl’s right foot needs to move down slightly as it looks odd where it currently is. Apart from that I’m quite pleased with how it’s going, though still fixated on the looming deadline, a bit like a possum blinded by the lights of an oncoming vehicle. Career roadkill perhaps?

More trivia: the landscape in the painting is based on the view from a farm on the top of a steep hill near Randal’s Bay in Southern Tasmania. When I was an irresponsible teenager, I got thrown off a bad tempered old pony that had learned that dashing down near vertical hills at speed was the fastest way to dislodge unwanted riders. Anyway, I landed on my head, ended up with a mild case of concussion and for a few seconds forgot how to speak English, or any other language for that matter. I sat on the ground looking at the magnificent view of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and saw the world in pictures not words. I guess it’s how very young babies see things, all shape and colour, nothing labelled and everything incredibly fresh and new. After a few minutes language started to return: I looked at the large brown thing smugly chomping grass and I thought ‘horse’, looked at the dark blue water and told myself it was a ‘river’.

The point to this anecdote is that the feeling of briefly being without language was really peaceful and the way things looked was terrific: blazing with freshness and colour. I want the painting to have the same kind of clear, new look- that’s the aim anyway.