Swallows and bunnies

But you can’t expect art gallery patrons to blur their eyes and adopt optimistic attitudes (the bastards!) so it was time to try again. This time I decided that the sky would work well a pale silvery grey, very close to the colour of the sky in the earlier painting A Tasmanian Childhood, the logic being that a more nuetral background would act as a foil to the vivid colours of the oranges and the flowers in the foreground.

The sky got repainted one night, then worked on for a couple more days before I was more or less happy with it. The pigments were pearl white, titanium white, silver and payne’s gray. In the end the tonal contrasts were still a tad too high, this is one of the problems with working at night, and I finished it a couple of days before the Despard exhibition opened on the 18th September.

One of the bad things about being chronically disorganised/liking to work under pressure is that you typically finish work just before a show opens, which obviously doesn’t give you time to reflect on what you’ve just created. In this case the story had a happy ending: when I walked into the gallery I saw the painting as a complete image, not a series of technical problems, and fell in love with it all over again. I’m hoping it goes to a good home.