This blog was originally supposed to be just about painting; I wanted to write about the everyday processes of the craft (a bit like trying to make a blow by blow description of washing up interesting) but I suppose some digressions are inevitable. Whenever I start thinking about a particular image it seems to be entangled with whatever was going on in my life at that time: memories, events, stories that people told me, what I was reading, inspired by, listening to, even eating. (Trivia: a strikingly beautiful Armenion Cypriot friend used to eat red food when she wanted her period to arrive early. Did it work? No idea, but I liked the idea. Another mate, a recovering anorexic, used to encourage herself to eat by having colour themed dinners: green or red tasted ok but white was a killer.)

The painting The Waterhole is a case in point; it deals with the here and now, but also layers of memory, both mine and other peoples. When I was a teenager one of my friends fell passionately in love with a red-haired girl; when her family moved away from Tasmania he was devastated and spent years in a kind of psychic spin. She had a high forehead, copper hair and very pale skin (a little like Botticelli’s Venus, in real life apparently another tragic, unattainable love interest). She is one of the models for the painting’s female figure.

In the 70s one of Mum’s friends worked as a dealer in Indian miniature paintings and antiques. I loved these tiny paintings and without knowing anything about the pantheon of Indian Gods absorbed from them ideas about the anti-naturalistic use of colour, non linear perspective and richly decorated surfaces. I like the directness of non Western art: how do you arrange your composition to show that a figure is particularly important? Bugger perspective and careful strategies to lead the eye around the picture; just make him or her three times the size of everyone else. The canopy of trees in my painting is an attempt to directly reference the colour and intricate patterning of these miniature images.

Lyrebirds: something I normally have no interest in, except for feeling slightly bitter that I’ve spent hours sitting on my ass on damp ground in rainforests waiting to see one, with no result. Then TM told me about some research he was doing, tracing lyrebirds through music and art history, and mentioned an early Australian music score that referenced their song, a kind of antipodean Leda and the Swan. He’d been invited up to the University of Newcastle Minding Animals conference to deliver a paper and stubbornly arrived wearing his favourite leather jacker; a near lynching by vegans was inevitable. Anyway, the elusive lyrebird resurfaced in my mind as something beautiful, otherworldly, unknowable, exquisite, mythical and delicate. The costume of my male figure is intended to represent a lyrebird’s plumage and if you look hard there’s a couple of lyrebirds courting on the dark green grass between the couple’s heads.

This is a painting all about lost love, the boy looking in the waterhole is a direct quote of the literary tradition of people having some kind of epiphany after catching sight of themselves in a mirror.

The Waterhole

And here’s The Waterhole, the final painting I finished for the Despard exhibition.

The Secret

And here’s the final version of The Secret…

swallows and hearts

Incidentally, the second confession I mentioned at the start of today’s blog was to do with the combined forces of technophobia, laziness and being extremely busy. As part of the University’s support for PhD students I was given a brand spanking new Apple laptop, which err… I had no idea how to use. So I continued to use my old pc until it died, then was forced into the wonderful world of Apple. Yes, all the cliches are true, it’s an intuitive and well designed machine which even a fool like me can use. But it still took some time to learn how to drive so the blog got put on hold until I’d worked out the basics.

birds and hearts

By the way, these heart shaped paintings are quite small, the Despard exhibition eventually had nine small hearts and three large oil paintings: The Secret, A Tasmanian Childhood and The Waterhole. As well as a few pen and ink/watercolour drawings and a couple of old oil paintings. The older work included one abstract from a period of time when I decided that it was time to have a holiday from my own style and practice of obsessively revisiting the same imagery; hence working with the purely formal elements of painting (colour, form, tone, texture, light) was really enjoyable, but it didn’t last long.

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.

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 a cerulean blue sky which I fiddled with, stitching it through with lighter and darker tones to try and give it movement, a kind of embroidered dynamism, which didn’t work. I decided that the reason it wasn’t working was that the tonal range between the lightest and the darkest blue was too great, it was foregrounding what was supposed, after all, to be background. So I reduced the tonal contrasts, repainted it more light blue on slightly darker blue and stood back to consider my masterpiece. Nope, still not working.

I got brave and decided to completely abandon naturalism by painting the sky pink. As any painter can tell you, this was a dumb thing to do. Why? Because the painting of the tree was largely complete, which meant that the pink paint needed to be carefully applied in the complex negative shapes around the branches and leaves. This is fiddly and takes hours and is a job that can be entirely avoided if one is sensible and decides before beginning what colour the sky should be, and sticks with it.

To cut a long story short, I painted the sky at night using halogens to illuminate the studio, and didn’t do a very good job at ‘cutting in.’ I think I was a bit tired and carried away with the idea that pink paint would save the painting. Also, at this stage, the deadline for the Despard Gallery exhibition was looming and I knew I was running out of time to finish. When I visited the studio the next morning the pink paint only looked good if I blurred my eyes and adopted an optimistic frame of mind.

Hummingbirds

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 Watt Space show looming, I decided to try and talk some friends into what I billed as some kind of fun afternoon ’spotting oranges.’ (Like many painters I occasionally exploit the ignorance of the general public concerning the less glamourous aspects of our craft. I remember talking various young men into posing for me nude, for free, with breezy explanations like ‘it’s for art’ ‘I’m a professional’ etc: though obviously this was a long time ago.) The ever reliable KS turned up, spotted a few oranges, decided it was harder than it looked, and suggested that we go for coffee instead. I’ve decided that if I’m ever in a position to hire an assistant it should be someone profoundly dull, technically impeccable, who thrives on water, self denial and hard tack.

The other thing I was trying to do with The Secret was fix up some dodgy bits of drawing vis a vis the dog’s front legs and the boy’s profile. The boy’s profile looked like one of those Picassos with the eyes pointing one way and the nose and mouth another, but veiled by the oil painting equivalent of an airbrushing effect. The problem was caused by selecting a three/quarters, slightly turned angle to the face, and then not being consistent with the angles of eyes, nose and mouth. In the end I repainted it as a straight profile and it worked much better, though it did cause a kind of strange pictorial dynamic in that most of the figures on the left hand side of the canvas are in profile, and most of the ones on the right hand side are looking straight at the viewer.

Nesting instinct (cupcakes and swallows)

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 then again when I had finished each afternoon. I think I got to about fifteen days of documentation before my laptop crashed, taking at least five days of photographs with it.

The computer technician who examined the unhappy laptop shook the hard drive, frowned, and explained that ‘it shouldn’t sound like a baby’s rattle.’ Like many stupid, stupid people the world over, I had failed to back up a lot of my data, including the most recent records of the painting, and am in the process of trying to piece together a whole heap of data such as tax records et al, can’t tell you how much fun this is. Let this be a lesson to you, because it certainly wasn’t for me: something nearly identical happened about five years ago.

My best estimate is that The Secret eventually took about a month to complete. It was exhibited at Watt Space as part of the Animal in Us group exhibition, an event that ran alongside the University of Newcastle’s Minding Animals conference, though I went on to make quite a number of changes to it after the show.

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.