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"