A Tale of Two Paintings

Unfortunately I’ve fallen behind on updating this site with my recent work – life has been too busy of late, so it’s time to catch up now.

Let me begin with “The Red Tree”, acrylic and ink on 122x80cm inscribed hardboard…

It’s quite a large piece for me, and it was extremely difficult. I wanted a sense of distance, with the marching rows of hills and mountains typical of the landscape around Canberra. A glowering, moody Turner-esque sky. The haze of an approaching dust storm, as often occurred during the last El Nino here when drought ravaged the countryside. And the ceaseless expansion of suburbia, clearing land, denuding the landscape of trees.

I painted just a single tree, the same one I painted a couple of years ago in Mysterious Ways in fact, as it’s a tall old survivor from an ancient forest that’s now long gone. It stood on that hill long before Europeans came to this country, but now it stands alone & its days feel numbered. Why is it red? Firstly it stands out, which I wanted, but also because it’s universally a colour meaning danger, the colour of our stop signs and traffic lights.

As I said, this painting was difficult, taking the better part of two weeks, as there were too many elements. The receding lines of hills in particular were a nightmare! When I finished I was pretty burned out, and needed to blow out the cobwebs with something small, fast and free…

“Sleepless Thoughts” is acrylic & ink on 61x42cm hardboard.

I painted this in the early hours of the morning over the course of two nights, due to a bout of insomnia (which has thankfully receded!)

After applying a base coat of orange, I squirted colours straight onto the surface from the tubes – diazepam purple in the upper left, prussian blue in the upper right, cobalt blue in the middle, and a few lighter shades of purple, pink, blue and green in the lower half. I then basically went nuts with a large brush, loosely pushing the paint around, mixing and blending it where it felt appropriate. Adding other squirts of new colours and brushing them in as well. Not a technique to use if you want to plan your painting in advance or economise on paint, but certainly good for just letting out your stress and allowing creativity to flow!

I stood back, felt it was a bit too blue and needed some contrast especially in the middle. So while the paint was still wet I used kitchen paper to gradually rub back some areas until a diffuse orange glow began to emerge from the base coat underneath. This gave me the thought of turning that into fire, and reflecting it onto the mix of colours below in order to give the impression of it being water.

I thought about adding recognisable objects in there – trees and the like – but decided against it. I felt the painting would be better as an abstract expression of the turbulent and circling thought patterns typical of insomnia rather than turn it into something else.

I really enjoyed painting this way, and will certainly come back to it again, though it’ll take a lot of practice to master.

Both of these paintings will be part of my solo exhibition in the Humble House Gallery in October, 2023.