It's a bloody trial!

These were from a show I had in late 2002 at Mary Place, and Early 2003 at the Alliance Francaise in Sydney.

This first one is a polyptich - a series of small canvases stuck together with velcro (not a great system really). It's based on a kind of walking panorama across two bays linking John Peter Russel's old house in Port Goulphar, right around to Port Domois. The polyptich offers a 180 degree view of a series of rocks which lie between the two bays. They feature in a really fugly Monet painting at AGNSW - and are pretty amazing. As you can see, I went completely bananas with the colours.



The second one is one of my favourite paintings, and probably the best I've done. (sigh). It's of stormy seas near Sarah Bernard's old house at Le Poulains and the rocks feature in some big panorama photograph that you can always see at framing shops. The colours are wild - but I stuck in a goose shit sky which gives a tonal structure so the brighter colours don't go floating off into space. the goose shit also adds an air of gravitas - which deepens the expressive complexity. (Hell, I know it's vintage, but I'm a fauvist at heart).


I put this one in - to show the effect of having a too keyed up tonal range. The colours are alll yummy and delicious and bright and the texture is like gelato - but then that's the problem. It's a painting of a ROCK so the sickly sweet thing is a bit incongruous, even though it matches my hallway really well.


This one was an attempt to repeat what I'd done with my favourite: a wild sky and choppy sea almost abstracted to mix with the rocks. It doesn't quite work because the marks aren't controlled enough - there are too many repetitive blobby things and not enough composition in what marks and colours go where - so it's a bit of a screaming cacophany, albeit an interesting one.

2001 Paintings from Belle Ile en Mer

I was so inspired by looking at rocks that I decided to learn how to do oil painting. Surprisingly enough, this was something that I had almost entirely managed to avoid while doing a painting major at NAS. It's not that I took any ideological position against oil painting - it's just that it's bloody slow, and I wanted to do and learn as much as I could while I was at art school.





I know the one below looks pretty crappy - but it is a little testament to my tentative attempts at plen aire painting under a blustery Breton wind. clad in parka, balaclava and ski pants I wedged myself into a cliff crevice and tried to resist the gale force winds belting around while I scratched out this image. I did 10 oil skethces on sight and used none of them - and realised that painting needs to be fluid product of the moment where it is being created, and I need to be moving while I'm doing it, not frozen solid trying to grip onto my brush and canvas so they don't go sailing over some cliff.