Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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Problem number two with The Secret concerned the sky. For some reason as soon as you paint a sky blue the whole history of naturalistic landscape painting falls on your head, and if you’re not interested in working within this tradition you may as well pack up and go home. The Secret started life with…
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A bit of technical trivia about The Secret is in order: last time I wrote I was trying to make the oranges look more like round fruit and less like orange circles. I was under the delusion that covering them with thousands of little dots would do the trick, and with the deadline with the…
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Ah… two confessions to make. With the best will in the world, I had intended to document every stage of at least one painting, in this case the 5’x5′ oil on canvas titled The Secret. All was going quite well, I would photograph the painting before I started work on it for the day and…
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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…
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And oranges make their appearance on the tree, it’s something of an event. I’ve been vaguely playing with the idea of painting a golden pear tree, I like the uterine shape of the fruit, or an apple tree, but thought the painting would overload with biblical references. So oranges it is. Oranges, after all, are…
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Struggling to finish this painting for an exhibition deadline next week. The frustrating thing at the moment is that none of the different areas of the image are resolved, nothing is truly finished, even the simplest forms are crying out for more paint. Today I realised that I didn’t like the way the cat’s spine…
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The birds at the top left and right corners of the image were originally conceived as some kind of half human/half bird figure. I’d vaguely imagined these bulky birds, shaped a bit like buzzards but a bit more graceful, with human eyes and heart shaped wings. (A bit of trivia: one of my neighbours married…
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A bit of trivia about my studio. It’s in a building that used to be a maitenance shed, and half of the building is still used by the maitenance crew that looks after the University grounds: I’m pleased to report that the proud tradition of the tea break still lives on. I haven’t had the studio space…
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Neither the female figure on the right hand side or the cat sitting next to her were working so I painted over them. At this stage I’m still working in acrylic, though just about to swap over to oil paints on the sky.
