Since my last post I have done about a dozen or so paintings and three pastels.

Mallee fowl mound relic

Oils on canvas 36” x 48”

Over 100 years ago a local identity, Max Wehrstedt caught a Mallee Fowl chick in Big Bush. Max was maybe ten and he raised this chick with the chooks. It was friendly and happy enough he said. Mallee fowl were common enough around here in those days. There was an active Mallee fowl mound/nest or two in what is now Ingalba Nature Reserve in the early 1970’s but I never saw the birds. Ian and Laurel Thompson sometimes saw them. One of the last mound/nests was on a bush block that was bulldozed and after that I think there were no more Mallee fowl around here.

Max’s pet Mallee Fowl was killed in a freak accident. Maybe a hundred years ago.

There are quite a lot of slight mounds with an accumulation of small quartz gravel chips in Big Bush to this day, though they are getting harder to recognise as they settle. I presume these were mallee fowl nest/mounds. (Please Google” Mallee Fowl nests” if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

So this painting is about one of the mounds still just visible in Big Bush. It’s in the centre, about 12” from the top of the painting. You might see some speckles; the gravel chips I mentioned. A sacred site for me.

Quandong madness

Acrylics on canvas 36” x 48”

Well, um, this is a lunatic painting. Is the seed of the quandong leaving the fleshy fruit to go walkabout? Or what?

I’ve done lots of paintings with Quandongs over the years and try to do something different each time. Maybe I’m running out of “different” ideas. Hence the lunatic contrivance.

Kurrajong/Pinnacle

Oils on canvas 24” x 36”

Right up near the top of the “Pinnacle” (a hill near here that I love to climb) is a rather magic Kurrajong tree.

Spotted Gums; Rain

36” x 30” oils on canvas

Mimosa Rocks National Park on a rainy day.

Wallagoot Foliage out the window

30” x 24” Oils on canvas

From a pencil drawing looking out the window at James’ place.

When doing pencil drawings on the spot I like to seek out movements and relationships amongst the abstract shapes I am perceiving. These translate easily to pencil squiggles with darks suggested only by making heavier boundaries and some token shorthand hatching on the dark side of the line. The temptation is to play with the abstract aspects: dynamics, repetitions with progressing variations, like music…

 So when doing a painting from such a drawing I have to remind myself:

“Hey, this is eucalyptus foliage and branches and trunks…Did I want to show that?”

Out the door

Oils on canvas 24” x30”

My third floor studio door opens onto an outside staircase with a view of Black Cypress Pines, White Gums , Xanthorea Grass Trees, Ironbarks…

About 10:30 am, November. I enjoyed the whooshy shadows and maybe I contrived the clouds to counter-whoosh. It’s a bit sketchy, as happens when working en plein air.

Grey Box Altarpiece

36” x 24” Oils on canvas

I wanted to bedeck a couple of Grey Box trees with sacred vestments, altar cloths etc.

The bark textures on grey box trunks suggest embroidered textiles. As I ponder these details; these textures and colours generate for me, a state of wonderment and veneration.

 Fine detail and texture overlap; and the area of overlap is pregnant with creative possibilities.

Everything in this painting (and indeed in Big Bush) has a textured surface. Foliage is a larger scale texture of flicks and very open with air, branches, birds etc in between the flicks (which are brush marks, which are leaves etc)…

 Leaf litter is fallen gumleaves, bits of bark and sticks of all sizes. Brush marks here, are more horizontal; angled to left and right.

Bark on trunks present finer scale flakes and fissures but permeable nonetheless providing ensconses for insects, mosses etc. Here I am using my small sable and synthetic sable brushes. What is firstly laid out as organized brush marks offers opportunities for quirky shapes and movements…and elusive X-ray views inside the tree trunk itself.

 The intricacies and ecological significance of all eco-systems is exquisite. And remember that it’s all conveyed with paint marks on a piece of canvas;  So it’s all tricks; an illusion.

I’m thinking about all this as I edit, tidy, finish my paintings.

Furthermore it’s always enjoyable to devise little discreet architectural structures as well as insect-like, bird-like camouflaged fragments: “ Zoophytes”.

This process approaches “decoration” but it is structural and contextual with esoteric story-telling.

Everything in the painting is inter-related. And the relationships go beyond the painting to the rest of the cosmos: that’s my intention; and each painting is related to previous and future paintings.

Mallee Bark Slough

Acrylics on canvas 36” x 48”

Out west of here is Matakana Nature Reserve. A patch of the original mallee ecosystem miraculously preserved from the dozer, ball and chain. (White man destroying nature in pursuit of progress and profits)

The predominant small trees are eucalypts. Multi-trunked and only a few metres tall. Like most  eucalypts they slough off most of their bark annually and expose fresh warm-hued bark. I’ve added a bit of a whoosh to everything, as one does.

Interbeing

Oils on canvas 36” x 24”

It seems more than coincidence that clouds seem to mimic the shapes and dynamics of the tree crowns below. Or vice versa, or both.

During my time in the Amazon forest, where the majority of clouds were cauliflower-topped cumulous; and the tree crowns of a very similar structure, the “coincidence” seemed to be an irrefutable rule. Very um, trippy. I was filling page after page in my notebooks with drawings of this phenomenon, particularly on boat trips down to Puerto Maldonado or Iquitos for supplies.

But it happens everywhere. It illustrates or confirms the Buddhist teaching (confirmed by Quantum mechanics now) that everything in the universe is inter-related and without this inter-relationship nothing can EXIST. Hence “Interbeing”. My trick here is to imply a whoosh once again.

So I find it very intriguing when doing these paintings, to bear this in mind. As the painting proceeds a stage is arrived at where everything in the painting knows what every other bit in the painting is doing, thinking, feeling…Trippy!

Ascension of Grevillea robusta

30” x 24” Oils on canvas

Further games with treetops and clouds. There is a beginning in these cloud paintings of something I might try to take a little further in my next cloud paintings. I’m still learning how to draw clouds, but getting more confident…

Summer Storm; thinking of Soutine

Oils on canvas 32” x 42”

I love the way Soutine pushed and shoved things around in his paintings: He was a master of the WHOOSH! I’ve just been reading a brief biography of him. What a life he had, and what a character.

His paintings imply awesome forces at work on landscapes, buildings and people. These forces really exist out there; working away on planet earth and the cosmos. Soutine managed to depict them in a way that is easy to see.

Compared to Soutine, my paintings employ rather more restrained whooshes.

 

Pastel; Spotted Gum /rain.

24” x 19” pastels on Mi Tientes paper

A very wet day, with my son,  James, in Mimosa Rocks National Park..

 Matakana Study

Pastels on Mi tientes paper 16.5” x 23”

 Wyalong Storm

Pastels on Mi tientes paper  16.5” x 23”

This is another pastel, arrested at a scribbly stage.

I usually feel compelled to say something about the state of the world at the end of my post but this time I’d rather not,

But under torture I would mutter that the worst of my fears have come to fruition. And a further few jabs of the cattle prodder would have me recommend that the only way we can preserve our sanity over the next four years is to foster a massive appetite for black humour.