Some Birds

As part of my experiments in the Asian style, I have been practicing painting birds. I have really enjoyed this, and think I will definitely be doing more.   Here are two paintings of cranes - very simple, but fun.

Three Cranes 1

Three Cranes 2

A Touch of Asian

Recently I obtained several books on using the Asian painting style.  I have found the simplicity of colour, and the delicate paintings of the Asian style quite intriguing, and have tried incorporating it into some small studies, which I have included here for interest.  I have been painting flowers, landscapes, grasses, fruits and birds, and have totally enjoyed doing it.  Here are some examples, done in acrylic on canvas. Apologies for the quality, because I took the photos through the glass frames, as I was heading to the market with them.  I have found that they are just the right size to paint for a reasonable price.

 

A Touch Of Paris



Le Consulat - a rainy night



Every now and then I want to paint something real, and in this case I had a lovely photo of Paris at night.  I am a little hesitant at reproducing what is best shown in a photo - I am not a camera.  So I have taken a little liberty with the photo and added my own touches, as well as removed a few.  The Le Consulat restaurant is located in Mont Martre, which is a popular tourist destination in Paris with lots of little back streets and restaurants and cafes.  I have included below a photo of it during the day - pretty dingy I would have to say.

The photo I used for this painting was a very bright and vibrant picture, but I wanted to show dark, wet and lonely.  So with a little manipulation, and use of a very french blue colour throughout, I think I have achieved that.  The dome of Sacre Coeur looms in the background like a ghost hovering in the foggy clouds.


A photo of Le Consulat by day - courtesy of the internet.



"Lost Souls"



Lost Souls 1 of 2



These two paintings are quite different to my normal work.  The title "Lost Souls" reflects my thoughts as I painted these.  In my mind, the blackened gum leaves floating over the red burned landscape, reflect on lost souls and life as a result of the huge bushfires that still loom large in our memories.  For our family, our memories go back to 2003 and the bushfires that severely burned around our home in the Mitta Valley, and destroyed parts of our local community.  The more recent bushfires of 2010 with their huge loss of life also loom large in my mind, and will never be forgotten.

The unspoiled flowers reflect the hope of a new life, the ability of the landscape to regenerate, and for people to adapt to their new circumstances.

Hope you too can understand the depth I felt when painting these two paintings.  It has been very difficult for me to finish them.



Lost Souls 2 of 2






Waterfall Carnarvon Gorge

One of the places we loved visiting during our recent trip to Queensland was Carvarvon Gorge National Park.  The gorge features a number of different walks, and one of  the walks went to an extremely lovely spot called Moss Gardens.  The area was very green and lush, and had a lot of moss and a small waterfall and pool.  I took a photo of the waterfall thinking that it might make something good to paint, and I have included one of the photos for interest.  I have made two paintings of the waterfall - the first being in its original greens and with moss and ferns.  I was very disappointed with this first painting, because it had no zing and was pretty boring.  So I decided to have another go. 

Anybody who has been to Carvarvon Gorge will quickly say that the colours in my second painting are nothing like the gorge, and they are quite right.  The rock colour in the gorge is quite whitish brown, and very washed out looking.  The original photo shows the rock as being brownish white with  touches of red oxide in the cracks, so I decided to exaggerate the red, and thereby give the painting a little lift.  I am told by my husband that it makes it too unreal!!  Too bad because I quite like it.  After changing the painting to reds, I just couldn't leave the moss there anymore, as it looked wrong, so hence the changes.

Photograph - Moss Gardens Carnarvon Gorge

Carnarvon Gorge 1

Carnarvon Gorge 2

The Splash

I have been painting a few monochromes lately, and this is an example of one.  I quite enjoy using shading rather than colour for  a change.  This one just came from nowhere, but enjoyed adding the little droplets at the bottom, just to make you almost feel the splash.

The Splash

A Different Style

So here are a couple of small paintings I have done recently in a more relaxed modern style, using newspaper collage to give texture to the works.  Not sure where the ideas came from, but I feel that I could do a few more of these.  Can you tell that I like yellow?!!  The Cityscape is about cities and how they denude their surroundings, and the two posts/towers on the left are meant to be a comment on Telstra towers!!!!





Cityscape

The Stairs











More Reflections

I can't seem to stop myself from painting reflections, so here is another one.  I am not sure that the photo does the painting justice but that's how it goes.

Reflections 3 or The Boathouse

Holidays - or How to Paint in a very small space

Finally it's time to sit down and update my blog with the paintings I did while on holidays. 

I must admit that painting whilst travelling in the confined space of a very small caravan can be quite a challenge, however I was able to keep painting by limiting myself to A3 size canvass sheets, which I could finish in just a few hours, rather than doing anything too big.  In any event, I was able to get quite a few paintings done, and I definitely have more ideas to go now that I'm home again.

I haven't loaded all of the paintings - just a sample - to show you that I am still painting in all styles.



Collision



Cosmos Botanical

Droving at Hughenden

Lorikeet

Winter at Dalby

Study in Blue

Blackbutts

Salmon Hole - Beachport SA

Mandarins

Flowing water

Waterfall

Final Paintings from TAFE Course

The last part of our TAFE course concentrated on how to paint clouds and reflections.  To paint clouds you need to paint them in a number of layers of colour, thus bringing out the depth and giving them dimensionality.   To help us out with our reflections, we had a field trip down to a local lagoon, and a bit of practice, and then it was time to put paint to paper.  These are the paintings I finished up doing :



Reflections 1




Reflections 2

 Then finally I had a go at an abstract - I used teapots as my subject, based on some beautiful pottery teapots I saw at the The Potters Beechworth shop.

Teapots

Some bright abstracts

These two paintings were painted very quickly, and just came from nowhere. I had been reading about artist Pierre Soulages, who painted a lot in black and was known as "the painter of black".  I have never painted with black before, and quite liked his abstracts.  The backgrounds are following a week of experimenting with various coloured underpaintings.  I must have needed a colour fix.  The photos don't do the colours justice as usual - the reds are much stronger.

The old wharf

Cafe scene

Landscape - Sunday evening

I started this landscape some time ago, but grew bored with it and put it aside.  The original painting was bright green, and set on a bright sunny summer's day.  After thinking about it for a while, I decided that I needed to change the mood, and so converted it to an evening setting.  So hence, the church became the focal point of the painting, and the lighted windows gave it it's name of "Sunday evening".  The hills in the background are very similar to the hills in the Mitta Valley, where we used to live.  The village and grape vines are taken from a Barossa style setting, in South Australia.

Sunday evening

Another VERY Bright painting

I just can't seem to stop painting bright colours.  This one was inspired by a piece I saw by Baptist, and I thought I would try it out.  I have painted yellow over rose madder, and the colours just shine through. It's a shame the photo doesn't show the pinks as well as I would like.


Country Village



The inevitable nude

As all of my followers will know, I am a fan of ABC2's Forger's Masterclass.  And of course one of the most recent episodes was about nudes.  So I of course had to have a go.  I was a bit hesitant to put it up here, but my friend Carolyn was a bit persuasive, and so here it is. 

Pregnant woman or "For Carolyn"

Work for TAFE

I am finding that TAFE is definitely interfering with my output, and at the moment I am concentrating on a history essay - I thought I was past that!!!

Anyway, the requirement was to produce a painting in our favourite colour.  I couldn't make up my mind which was my favourite colour - yellow or purple, so did both!  NATURALLY!



Study in purple

 Anyway, here are my efforts.  The swans comes from a photo in The Age newspaper, and the cityscape is from my imagination, courtesy of Melbourne.  I am afraid that the purple in both photos has not come across as deep and intense as it is in the real.



Study in yellow



A Very Easy Abstract - Flowers Again

The other day I just wanted to throw something together very quickly and saw an ink and acrylic work on the net that was quite pretty, so I had a go too, and this is what I came up with.  Love the colours.  This is definitely not an original one. 

Flowers - ink and acrylic

An Abstract (Barb Style)

As I mentioned some time ago I am studying painting at TAFE, and part of our course a few weeks ago required us to paint an abstract using a formula of some straight lines, circles, zigzags, and curved lines.  This is the painting I did in class - rough but quite interesting.

TAFE Class Work - abstract

As a result of that I decided I needed to do a real canvass abstract at home.  For my colour scheme, I thought I would try an analagous colour scheme in the blue/blue-green/violet/red violet range.  However, when I put the painting together I thought it was pretty boring, so I decided to ditch it.  Which led me to throwing the rest of my leftover paint at it, using a palette knife (my absolute favourite tool).  I began to like it, and then added some extra colour with a little lemon and some magenta.  I still reckoned it needed something, so after a little thought I decided to sew some very very bright orange string onto it as well.  (I have been wanting to sew onto a painting for a while, and this was my first attempt!!) So here it is - unfortunately the photo is not so good!!

"Orange string"





Mixed Media - Going Shopping



"Going Shopping" or alternatively "Face in the Window"

 It was time to have another go at a mixed media using collage and acrylic.  This painting originated from a photo of a painting by collage artist Mike Bernard (who does heaps of paintings of buildings), but once I got going on it, I thought the original needed something extra, so I added the lady on the rickety old ladies bicycle.  Then a couple of days later, I added the little dog, which I now think really finished the painting off. 

I have used newspaper to give texture to the walls and road surface, serviettes with aqua surrounds for the windows of the shop, and cutouts for the shop names, some of the washing on the line, and the face in the window upstairs.  The little dog was also a find on the internet, and I have painted over the original cutout to give more texture to it.  How many dogs have you seen running along the street, just like this one, chasing after a bicycle?

My effort at painting in the impressionist style



Garden at Leneva

 Thanks to ABC2's Forger's Masterclass again, some friends and I decided that we too needed to try our hand at a Monet, painting in the impressionist style.  So we arranged a day in the country, at sister-in-law Barb's place at Leneva, and set up our easels in her lovely olde worlde garden.  Barb had mowed the lawn for us, and there were heaps of things flowering, including lots of roses and the oleanders you can see in the middle ground. The day was lovely and cool, and just perfect for painting out of doors.  We had a lovely day, and we promised ourselves that we needed to do it all again soon.

 So here is my effort in the Monet style - that is, lots of daubs of colour to create an illusion of light.  In this case, I was surprised to find that by following Monet's technique, I was able to use colour to reflect the dappled morning light that shone through at about 9.30am when we started painting.  By 4.00pm, the light had completely changed, but thankfully the morning light effect had already been captured. I'm not sure if Monet would have used the tree trunks to frame his painting, but I just liked the look of it.

Colour and Fauvism

Thanks to ABC2 I have been captivated by their TV program Forger's Masterclass on Sunday nights.
One of the recent shows was on Andre Derain, a fauvist painter of the early 1900's. From Wikipedia:

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions.^[1][2] The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.<sup>[1]

So here is my version, in my own simplistic style and with my own choice of colours - I like 'em bright!!  The painting is called "Cityscape - Santiago, Chile" and is taken from memory and from photos.  The old church, the railing. and the distinctive building on the right are taken from one of Tom's photos of Santiago. I love the way the building on the right glows - one of those things that just happens when I painted over the dark red background!</sup>



Cityscape - Santiago, Chile



Another Landscape - South Georgia

A couple of blogs ago I promised an Antarctic painting coming on.  So here it is.  This painting is set in Summer, on South Georgia, in the Antarctic.  We visited there in 2007, and this painting is a composition of things we saw.  The painting is set at Gritviken, an old whaling station, and now a museum and scientific base.  Gritviken is also the place where the explorer Ernest Shackleton is buried.  So, I have called this painting "Graveyard - South Georgia", and as you will see Gritviken is a graveyard for old exploration vessels as well.  Shackleton's grave is in the graveyard at the left rear of the painting, across the harbour.  To contrast against the dead ships and the graveyard, and the stark mountain sides and scree slopes, I have included a sign of life in the form of grass, and a baby seal.  There were hundreds there when we visited - this one looks as though it has been disturbed whilst sleeping in the tussock.  The colour of the sea is a very cold-looking blue.  Funny enough, my husband recognised the place when I first showed him the painting, so there must be some resemblance.  I would love to add somer red to the painting to give a lift to it, but there just wasn't any around.


Graveyard - South Georgia



Started at TAFE

Just to log the milestone in my blog, I started TAFE Cert 3 in Visual Arts this week, doing painting.  Hope this helps!!!

Experiment with New Style - Lighthouse



The Lighthouse

 This painting is about light and dark.  The viewer is in the light, looking out through the grass to the dark lighthouse, quite clearly no longer in use.  The style is new for me and experimental, and I quite like the way the aloneness of the dead lighthouse is depicted and contrasted against the light and aliveness of the green grass.  I will probably be returning to this style in the near future.

Sunrise over Patagonia

I have returned to a landscape for this one.  It is completely from memory, and is of the southern part of Argentina known as Patagonia.  We travelled to South America in 2007, as part of our Antarctica trip.  We loved southern Argentina and Chile, and particularly the southern Andes and the associated glaciers, streams, and lakes.  This painting recalls the Andes, the snow-tipped mountains, and the beautiful racing streams.  I have a particular memory of sunrise, and the gold of the sun reflecting off the tips of the mountains, and I have tried to capture that in this work.
Some might think that the fern seems out of place, but my research tells me that the fern is Blechnum magellanicum, a slow growing tree fern native to southern Chile and parts of Argentina.  It is extremely hardy, and grows from sea level to 2200m, and can handle temperatures down to -15C.
I painted this one with a pallet knife, hence the roughness of the mountains and stream.  I particularly like the foreground stream, showing the water cascading over the rocks.  As usual, the photo has not done the colours of the painting justice.


Sunrise over Patagonia

 After painting this one, I think I might have to turn to Antarctica for more inspiration in the near future.  The colours there were so extreme.

Slum Child Completed at last

I have finally finished Slum Child, and as you will see it has changed a little from my earlier blog.  The colour of the girl's dress had to change to lemon, to give her more focus, and I have filled in more detail.  It is quite a dark picture, and not one everyone will like it.  The painting was done from a photo of a Mumbai slum, and I have not been able to include all the rubbish and accumulated debris of the original - there was just too much.  The colours are my own, as the original was very brown and dirty, and so I picked out the bits of dirty colour that were there and enhanced them to give the colour of the walls.

Slum Child (final)

Gum Tree Revised

I have had quite a bit of feedback about my "Snappy Gum" tree.  I had to agree with comments about the leaves being too heavy - it was my first tree and I didn't get it right.  So I practiced leaves a bit, then went back and changed the original.  I think the revised one is better, so here it is.  For those of you who asked, the gum is Eucalyptus leucophloia.  I was quite impressed with its fine upstanding habit.

Snappy Gum (E. leucophloia)

Memories of Germany

Most of my friends will be aware that our family lived in Germany for a couple of years in the early 90's. Since then, we have gone back to visit friends a number of times, and on several occasions have visited the Ruhrgebiet, an intense industrial area around Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg,and Oberhausen, where our friends the Bollings live with daughter Annette (who was an exchange student with us in the 90's).  My memories are of heaps of industry and non-stop urbanisation, and of course the Rhein and its associated waterways.  So, of course I had to try to put these memories onto canvas, and this painting is what happened.  In the painting you will see the spire of a huge cathedral, inspired by my memories of the cathedral at Koln (Cologne).  The trees are of course European.  In the bottom right, you will see a garden of bright red roses or perhaps geraniums, which were extremely common in the summer months.  One wonders what was going on in the bottom right, but my memories are of a huge statue and folly built on the top of a bluff overlooking the river and city, and this is what is hinted at here.

The colours are quite bright, simply because I wanted them to be.  I love the orange of the forest path in the bottom left. I remember that often, when we just wanted to get away from all the people, we would drive into the forest and take a walk.  When we first went to Germany in the early 90's, the skies were generally grey blue because of the smog.  However, with the breaking down of east Germany, and the improvement of industry in general, the skies have become increasingly bluer each time we visit.  As such, I felt happy to paint the skies as a bright blue, although there is a hint of the old smoggy skies towards the left of the picture.  As I worked on the painting, I have to admit that global warming came to mind, and the painting reflects these thoughts in the huge amount of concrete, the power station and the huge steam towers, the gas/oil tanks and the oil flares, the shipping of goods, and the huge energy consumption of the city at night.  Despite this, leisure goes on in the form of sailing, and nature is trying to offset all this through the retaining of woods and forests.  It all seems quite a lot to say in one painting!!

Memories of the Ruhrgebiet Germany

My First Portrait

Given that I am trying a little bit of everything, I thought it was time to try doing a portrait.  This one is titled "The Irish Fiddler" and is from a photo in the Age of Irish fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire.  I had been asked by a friend to paint a violin for her, as she has a passion for them, and so when I saw this photo I just had to have a go.  I know it's a fiddle not a violin, but I thought it might be close enough!!  Naturally, I have stylized the painting to my own liking, with some colours of Ireland in the background, and some collage in the foreground about Colm and his music.  I am not sure that Colm really looks like my painting, but he definitely has pale skin and red hair, which I was able to reproduce.  Not sure about the features though!! I think the best part is the fiddle.  Still, it encourages me for the future.


The Irish Fiddler

Here is the original photo, for your interest.



Original in The Age