Life, as they say, gets in the way. In this case it got in the way of posting regular updates about the progress of The Tiger Bride. And, more specifically, I’ve lost track of how many days I’ve been working on the image: I think it’s about thirteen or fourteen.

The painting has changed quite substantially. I decided that the tilted stone wall, rather than being visually edgy and interesting, was just plain wrong. So that got re-painted.

The next thing that went, ironically given that he was such a major part of the original composition, was the boy cradling the tiger’s head.

Artist angsting over painting!

I felt that the painting would work well with three elements: girl, animal and landscape, but not four. I also liked the ambiguity of the image once the boy was removed, with the displacement of the traditional boy meets girl dynamic, a whole host of strange possibilities open up: is the girl in fact the tiger’s bride? I’ve been reading some lovely fairy tales where ‘bride marries animal; animal turns out to be handsome prince enchanted by evil witch; animal removes skin and out steps a human’. Nice. There’s a nifty version when the bride decides to trap her husband in his human form by hurling his animal skin into the fire while he sleeps.

(Working wet on wet for the sky in this image; trying to get the everyday melodrama of Tasmanian cloud formations).

I’ve recently written a version of the tiger bride fairy tale, it’s part of the 1001 nights novella that I’ve blogged about earlier, but the roles are reversed. A human husband discovers his bride in her tiger skin, decides he prefers her that way, and throws her human skin onto the fire. I had this really strong, if grotesque, vision of a female skin flying through space, legs flopping around like stockings, breasts flaps waving in space.

Forming up the landscape in this version, still using photographic reference from my last trip to the island. I’m not exactly sure where the shot of the landscape was taken, somewhere in the north east. Also strengthening the drawing of the tiger, trying to get my head around the anatomy of something that I have never seen.

In this image, the mountains on the left hand side of the range have been blocked in.

A bad, blurry photograph of more work being done on the landscape. Trying to balance the tonal values so that the tall tree in the foreground, on the left hand side, doesn’t jump out too much. Compositionally it’s kind of balanced by the tiger’s tail, you can see a left to right diagonal running through the piece which starts in the tall tree and ends in the tail. I think of the girl as sitting at the junction of a number of V shapes; it makes it quite a stable image that I’m planning to upset by painting in a veil blowing in the wind. The veil will hopefully add some dynamism back into the whole shebang.

The mountain range looks almost predatory.

I have this tendency to see space like a naive painter, so everything is flat or tipped up, or layered like a theatre set (one flat thing placed in front of another). I’m currently playing with things so I can introduce more of a sense of space, but on my own terms; I’m not interested in traditional pictorial space (i.e. things look like you’re looking out a window, everything recedes in a predictable fashion, things that are further away are less tonally distinct than things up close). And, like a naive painter, I don’t really like complex angles as straightforward or profile shapes seem visually more honest.

The dress reminds me of the figure on the front of Rolls Royces: a bit Art Nouveau.

I’m not entirely sure what I was working on here, I expect the landscape and perhaps fiddling with the wall (which is still too cartoony for its own good).

I was talking to my grandmother about this painting the other day. Now my 92 year old Nana is a good person to talk to about painting, with my grandfather she opened up a commercial art gallery in Hobart (I believe it was the first one); she also paints, writes poetry and taught art for a number of years. I was saying that this was the first major work for my next show at Despard Gallery, Strange Tales, and that I’d be happy to get it finished and out of the way. I mean, if you cock up the first painting in a series, self doubt starts to set in. And unfortunately the way I work means that the risk of failure is pretty much neck and neck with getting something good, or at least it feels like that.

Anyway I described this painting as a ‘heartbreaker’ and Nana took me the wrong way, thinking that it was something that had been sucking up emotional energy, and so she blurted out ‘you must take care of yourself, dear’. When I’d actually meant that it was difficult technically speaking. However, on reflection, it’s actually a much sadder painting that I’d envisaged and I think that’s why it’s giving me some grief, and also why I’ve been reluctant to blog about its progress.

Victorian melodrama at play: the red dress arrives. Eventually this red dress will be thoroughly OTT, covered with lots of tiny bows and flounces like sea anemones. It’s important to me that the dress is at least as animated as the landscape and has a strange, female potency- a kind of entrancing, hypnotic, sucking quality.

At this stage the image is looking more like bride of Braveheart than anything else, something about the Scottish highlands in that background. And this is only going to get worse if I put in a mask or some other facial decoration, vaguely considering blue skin or an animal feature. I’m already anticipating the ripping off I shall receive from painting someone who looks like me (actually it’s from a photo of my daughter) in a classic regal pose riding on the Tasmanian State emblem. Like a radio play, I can hear this script: (Tasmanian artist in a whiney, aggrieved tone) ‘who the f**k does she think she is?’

You’ve got to stripe it, stripe it (to the tune of you’ve got to move it, move it…) And so the distinguishing feature arrives. Even if the viewer hadn’t already guessed the identity of the thylacine, this leaves one in no doubt. Next step is to grey down the gravel path underfoot, work on the flesh, do some more on the dress and the tiger fur. I’m playing around with lots of ideas, this desire to paint a rain of petals bursting from the sky like snow, this hankering after red and white roses, a longstanding inability to paint a human face without animalising it in some way. Such a sad, romantic image, the constant elegy of painting an extinct species, the gothic majesty of Tasmania’s landscape, a girl bravely attempting something ridiculous and impossible.