Coffs Harbour trip

After a frenetic end to the year, we packed the car and made the 6+ hour journey to Coffs Harbour to spend Christmas with our sister Tess and her family. We stayed at a beach house at Moonee Beach and it was a fab location. Lulled by the sea breezes and frangipani fragrance, I relaxed sufficiently to sketch. This is the sketch I made of Moonee beach.


Coffs is tourist mad at this time of year but we avoided the town. Tess lives in Central Bucca which is on the plateau of the range. To get there, we have to drive up these slopes planted with banana and avocado crops. It's very scenic. Then we get to Bruxner Park which is a gum forest, straight and tall. Snakes frequently bask themselves on the road. Finally we get to farm land and it's very lush this year after all the rainfall it received. This next sketch is of the banana coast.

Made Possible Exhibition Night

This exhibition cum Christmas party was held upstairs at Lisa's studio.  The Bakehouse is actually a warehouse where in a previous incarnation, bread was baked downstairs and wheat was stored upstairs.  There is a trap door on the floor to allow goods to be 'thrown?' down.  The venue is wonderful, very high ceilings and Scott, Lisa's husband did a great job in putting up the hanging system, under time pressure. 

On the very evening, it poured, which put a dampener on things.  However, those who came enjoyed themselves.  Several people expressed their interest in my gumnut ceramics.  I think it is one of those things that people either hate or love.  I also had some interest in my waterscapes, which was very nice.  It is lovely to be told to continue painting, that people love looking at my paintings.  I sold one of my little canvases.  Don't believe that many things were sold, so it was quite pleasing.

In any case, it was an enjoyable evening and if the weather was better, and the timing not so close to Christmas, we would enjoy better success.  Another show is scheduled for July, with the theme "Shady Ladies", where we have light fixtures and the like.

Gum trees

A visit to the studios of Piña Bartolo art teacher inspired me to paint these gum trees. Piña had done a series on trees and she said that it was a metaphoric for her mother and her 2 sisters. Her viewpoint was from below looking up, which emphasized the majesty of those trees. Here is my version.

Invitation to the Made Possible Exhibition

Miniature paintings

While its quite true that my social life is a blur, I must admit that the impending group exhibition for the Fri night girls art is spurring me to produce. I was also inspired by Judith Johnson's 9 inches by 5 inches panoramas when I went to her exhibition.


Small paintings are easy to find wall space for and are usually much more affordable. I did these two quite quickly. The first is a landscape of Peel where my artist friend Catherine has a property. The other is a vineyard in Milthorpe. I liked the way the rows of vines converged on the house, which was backed by huge trees.


There is much to do and so little time! But dear readers, the exhibition is at 54 Renwick St Marrickville on the 19 Dec between 6 and 8pm. All are welcome although Lisa requests no kids at that session.

Watercolor again

As the weather warms up I find more opportunities to sketch outdoors. And watercolor is a great medium for my quick sketches. I find my gestural work much better than the paintings: they are fresher and take less time to execute plus they give me the perfect reason to go outside and enjoy the lovely scenery. Am resolved to do a watercolor class next year.


This is a sketch and watercolor of a wharf at Leicchardt.

Bowral retreat

Attending a work related conference last weekend, I had the rare pleasure of combining my artistic interests with work. We stayed at the former estate of the Hordern family on acres of grounds called Milton Park. Lovely place with delightful gardens.


The vistas were so well conceived, offering peeps into different garden rooms. I just had to sketch what I could, whenever I could.


Food was also terrific and we all over ate although this was somewhat mitigated by a game of tennis on the well kept courts, watched by a small healthy herd of highland cattle.

King's canyon resort

The sketch I made of the cliffs surrounding the resort has been turned into this painting.


If the colours look unreal then my excuse is that in real life they look even more vivid!

Location:Prospect Rd,Summer Hill,Australia

King's Canyon

Some 300km away from Uluru by road is King's Canyon. We hopped in the car and belted down the highway. An astounding sight greeted us on the way, a Mesa called Mount Conner rising majestically from the plains. Photos do not do such geographical features justice. The subtle shades of purple and red just get mashed into a bland nothingness. Mount Conner is 3 times the size of Uluru! It's a wonder it is not as famous.

Further along, evidence was everywhere of last weekend's bush fires. The road to King's was totally cut off. The fire was stopped by the road; great contrast between the side ravaged and blackened and the other. Willy-willys crossed the road carrying soot with it and dumping these miles away.

King's Canyon is full of birdlife. We even spotted a dingo and numerous geckos. This was the view from our front door.

Well, as best as I could make it anyway. I then sat at their sunset vantage point and ignoring fellow guests drew this panaroma of the canyon.


It's of course many times more gorgeous than this sketch. But what I learnt is that the act of sketching and observing means it makes the painting much easier and less reliant on photos; it jolts the memory and is a worthwhile exercise... even if the sketch ends up less than satisfactory.

Uluru and desertscapes

I've always wanted to visit Central Australia and see for myself what our desert looks like. In my mind, I have a picture of an arid place, red dust everywhere. But when I got here, I found a surprisingly lush landscape, mulga trees, bushes, spinifax and grasslands dotting the ochre red earth. The hotel staff said that it rained heavily last weekend and the evidence is there with odd puddles, water leaking from the rocks and water holes that are full. The hotel pool area has these amazing ghost gums with dead white straight trunks.


The gallery had an artists in residence program and this month is Brian Dobson, a watercolorist from Maclaren Vale in South Australia. Brian has some gorgeous waterscape but I have a feeling that watercolors don't suit desertscapes. Also he paints Uluru as a whole rock which is what those postcard photographs do. A big cliche in my book. Maybe the tourists like them because they can recognize it. I set myself up at sunset near the resort's lookout point to sketch the landscape. It was gorgeous with the red earth, purple shadows and greenery.


Unfortunately I think that either watercolor cannot depict the extremely vivid colours and spiky shapes accurately or more likely, my skills in this media are sadly lacking. This morning we went to do a tour of the rock itself and up close it's deserving of the reputation. There were caves used by the aboriginals with rock art and lots of dreamtime stories. Plus this massive red rock wall as a backdrop.

Paintings of Brooklyn

Whilst at Brooklyn, I completed a painting of the path leading up the house from the car port. Perched high over the sandstone escarpment, the grounds included a cave, brilliantly orange and ochre when the sun hit it.


The study I made of the escarpment near the house was also turned into a painting. Muted colours, purple shadows and the barest hint of the glorious sandstone colour is in this painting: it depicts the escarpment just as the sun hits it early in the morning.


Indeed I got my pants all wet from perching on a dewy fence.

Brooklyn sojourn

After a huge day of preparations, I managed to get away to Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury River. My employer Robert had kindly offered me the use of their house in their absence and happily I was able to schedule it in. I left by myself on Thursday afternoon as I well knew the numerous plants I had to water, beds to make and paths to sweep. If I had gone on Fri I would have wasted half the day on the journey and chores.

After a goodnight's rest, bright and early on Fri morning I packed my watercolor set and went for a stroll. This painting is of the sandstone escarpment near Robert's house.

Lovely isn't it? Too many photos I've taken of the same subject have failed to highlight it's colours and beauty. I love this so much I plan to paint a larger version.


This next one was at the mangrove swamp. I like the watercolor effect for the leaves.


Finally after a walk of 2 km I settled at a cafe near the marina. The reflections of the pier caught my eye. I then walked back and began an acrylic painting of the view from the kitchen. All up, a very productive day!

Watercolours and the art of travel sketching

Having planned a trip to Uluru in a couple of weeks, I was thinking hard of how I'd pack a compact set for the purposes of travel sketching and painting. The problems with photographs are manifold, the colours never come out as what you see. Darker colours vanish into a uniform shade and bright colours just take over the image.
The solution is to sketch something on site - but this has to be done quickly and all art materials must be compact and highly portable.  My aim is to get a set together that will fit in a backpack that I can just sling on and get going by bike, bus, boat or train. This was what the Sydney artist Tom Carment was said to have done and how he managed to so many cameos of Sydney that we all identify with and love.
Previously I had done sketching using soft pastels. The problem with that was the colours are limited - not easy to mix pastels. The dust and mess plus the need to fix the image are off-putting. The other issue was that fixative is highly flammable and therefore not allowed on planes. Watercolour was the most common media used for travelling artists and I had to bite the bullet and enrolled myself in a one day workshop on watercolour and the art of travel sketching at Art Est.

Susie Murphie is a gregarious teacher, with a love for watercolours.  Her mission is to "spread the word about water colours". The key thing is to leave white (contrary to the acrylic painter, who is urged to cover every surface with paint as soon as practicable).  Watercolour paper is lovely in texture and so I guess there is a need for white to be left.  I took to it like a duck to water - mainly because I love gestural work - where one line can convey immense amount of information and for the rapidity of execution.  I do not think that it can be the final product though - lovely as it looks. Although Susie showed some beautiful books where someone's journal was published.

The first exercise was to copy an image and to try out the watercolour.  And then to paint some cumquat branches that Susie brought in.




After that we went to a street near Art Est and sketched 6 small cameos. We didn't paint on site, as the southerly had arrived by then and it was extremely windy.

Gable roof window with flowering grevillea	Parked boat
Red front door	Striped awning and yellow letterbox

Trees

After lunch, we did an exercise in cropping.  Travelling artists seldom have much time - the bus might go in 15 mins.  One way to capture something quickly is to zoom into an interesting bit.  Susie put up a row of photographs and asked us to crop and render a small part. 

Flying buttresses

Reflection

More Still Life Paintings

Inspired by Paul McCarthy, I went on a frenzy of still life painting recently.  Still life is most suitable for this time of the year as it is frequently too cold and wet to set up outside.  The subjects can be arranged as you please, and they do not move!  Furthermore, painting from life looks so much better than from photos or sketches.  There is virtually no downside with regards to the logistics of still life painting, although I do prefer to look at a lovely view than a lovely fruit. 

I did despair when I saw Margaret Olley's bush lemons after I had painted mine.  Of course she was a very famous and talented painter and I'm only starting out.  The point of the exercise is to try and paint a white tablecloth in the light, that actually had blue and bits of yellow in it.  Did you know that a white tablecloth isn't all white??

I'm quite fond of this painting of my gorgeous silver jug.  It has the most lovely reflections, and here I posed a pink camellia from my garden next to it.  The camellias in my garden are only just started to get going, whilst I know other people's gardens have finished with them.

Sculpture and other clay masterpieces

The firing has now been completed for works in clay and here are the results. My Shrek container is quite audacious. I rubbed iron oxide on the texture to get the effect.


The gumnut/ Shrek ears are a bright orange red inside.


And then there is the nude model; this time with a head and arms!





The final thing I brought home (there are quite a few items still at the studio) is this flower frog which turned out a delicate green blue.


Of course if I were a methodical note taker like my studio mate Lilli I would now have meticulous records of the glazes and underglazes. And be able to replicate the effects. Ahhh.... To be so organized!

Florist scene

My continuing interest in flowers has led me nearly 10 months later into painting this scene of my daughter at the florist cafe where Cath and I had our exhibition last year. Yuga is lovely because of the florist part. Setsuko informs me that she has moved her operations over to another shop nearby since.

Still life with poppies

Apologies for the photo but it was proving difficult to get the right exposure. In a bid to get the poppies on paper before they faded, I had to forego a shopping excursion with my 2 shopping buddies. Well it was probably worth it as this painting is really vibrant with those shades of yellow and orange against pthalo blue. Over the years I have finally made a friend of pthalo blue which used to take over all my paintings with the least encouragement.


Paul has unleashed something creative in me as I've completed 4 paintings in 2 weeks!

Still life with wattles

Wattles are in season and I was very taken by their yellow powdery beauty. For weeks I drove around with secuteurs in the car looking for an opportunity to snip some off, preferably from public property. Finally succeeded in sneaking these on a dark rainy night (location best not disclosed!).


Taking advice from Paul and Sarah, I plonked the lot on the studio floor for a more interesting composition. And attempted to follow Paul's colorful style by placing the mandarins in a teal blue bowl to make the colours sing.

Wild landscape workshop

On Saturday I attended an enjoyable workshop where Art Est's funny art tutor and raconteur Paul McCarthy regaled us with stories and showered one and all with good natured insults. Paul tells us that he has been painting for 30 years which seems incredible for a 45 year old. His work is wonderfully loose and gestural. He is a colorist and will put the most brilliant teal or magenta on with effects that I can only envy.

Paul's style is relaxed and he works pastels into the dried painted paper to give it highlights and to emphasize lines. Here is an attempt I made of a scene down the Illawarra.

Great isn't it? It only took me 2 hours. So I had another go. This time I got into trouble straight away and had to be rescued. This painting is definitely more like Paul's style. It is abstract and colourful.


I don't think I've quite mastered the colours but the loose gestural way he works is rubbing off. I'm quite inspired to paint a few more pieces now that I've restarted. Have to remember a few tips: 1. Line and colour interruptus. Boring to have large areas of one colour or a straight line 2. Work the whole painting at once : do not focus on a small area 3. It's ok to have strange colours so long the tone is right.

Illawarra landscape

During the school holidays I took my daughter down to Stanwell Park where we stayed at a lovely house with views of the bush and escarpment. We took our sketch pads and charcoals.


I haven't done sketching for quite a while which makes it a nice change. We also visited the Wollongong Art Gallery where a series of gouache and ink paintings were on display. The resident artist Maree Faulkner has a lovely whimsical style.

Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox

Over the weekend we made an excursion to Brisbane to see the exhibition Art, Love and Life featuring the works of Australian artists Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox. Carrick and Fox were married around the turn of the last century and went to Europe to paint. Both are fabulous painters of quite different styles.

Fox painstakingly captures the effects of light brilliantly and preferred subjects of the leisured upper classes whilst Carrick paints markets and beaches plein air. Carrick's style is much more gestural and somewhat under developed but full of live. Towards the end of their lives together their subjects converged although their styles did not change.

What impressed me even more than the artworks was the Queensland Art Gallery's iPhone app which replaced audio tours. Selected works have videos available and QAG even provides free wifi to enable visitors to download videos. Well done QAG! And may this blaze the trail for the Art Gallery NSW and National Art Gallery to follow.

More organic forms

My studio mate Jo lent me this great book by Clayton Ball on building ceramics minus the wheel. It was written in the 1960's which makes it over 40 years old. The aesthetics of those days were quite different: texture was big and chunky organic forms were in. Quite a contrast to the more delicate and symmetrical forms usually made of porcelain and thrown on a wheel.

I love both types of ceramics but without a wheel, Ball's wonderfully gutsy forms certainly captured my imagination. If something was going to be hand-made, it would never be symmetrical so why even try? Embracing the quirks of hand made objects and exaggerating these imperfections in fact, lent the end product an undeniable charm.

As an experiment, I built this vase? sculpture? using newspaper as the stuffing following Ball's instructions faithfully. When texturing the clay, I first used a banksia with it's wonderful curves and indents. However the imprint looked too much like pubic hair and when it got too close to the leg, it all looked too much like male genitalia for comfort!

My hubby thinks it looks like Shrek and Doreen said "Fiona? Is that you? Have you grown an extra ear?"

More gumnut inspired ceramics

Here is a pix of my pot with flower frog lid. It is very idiosyncratic and inspired by mushrooms and lunar craters. This specimen is not yet bisque fired.


I made a smaller frog which I won't make a pot for. Too hard...


Also made another pot that has gumnuts on top. However the lid won't be a frog as it's very difficult to get the holes through the stem to be large enough to fit flowers through.


I plan to glaze the nuts a bright green with the inside a dark burgundy. The pot itself I think will be a celadon green and it's inside burgundy.

Gum nuts inspiration

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the flowering gums are in bloom and looking great. But with the recent rain and gales they have been blown away leaving the sculptural forms of their nuts behind. A walk around the neighborhood (secateur in hand) lent me the opportunity of collecting and examining a number of different gumnuts.


Aren't they beautiful? I am using these as inspiration for my pottery. Although not posted too often here, I've been busy thinking about and making clay models and pots. There is considerable time lag with ceramics as there is a need to bisque fire and then glaze before a second firing. Also all that waiting in between to gather sufficient numbers to fire. However I shall take some photos of works in progress next opportunity and post it here.

A Commission

Those of you who follow my blog will know of the avenue of autumn leaves http://mengwoo.blogspot.com/2010/06/plane-trees-in-autumn.html that I painted last year. Whilst at our house, my brother-in-law Jeff and his wife Toom admired the painting but I had no idea they were interested in purchasing it. The painting was exhibited last year and they were just about to purchase it a few minutes into the opening, when a red dot was placed next to it. "What does that mean?" Toom asked the gallery owner. "That means that it's been sold!" he explained.


Having missed out, Jeff decided to commission me to paint another just like it. Now, a commission is a commission, right? Artists can't afford to turn these away, can they? Yet, my personality is such that doing anything once is fine (there's the bits about trying something new, finding something different to explore and improve on) but painting the same subject twice? I fobbed them off with the line that I've to have autumn trees before I can paint them.... which gave me another 6 months to think about it. Well, autumn was definitely here in Sydney. In fact, the wind has blown all the leaves off now as officially, we are in winter. So I've run out of time, and had to knuckle down and produce! Thankfully, it is easier the second time around. I plan to give the painting to Jeff as a present for his next birthday. He tells me he has a space awaiting (6 months of a blank wall..... I do feel a bit sorry and hope this will be an adequate compensation).

Underwater scene

On vacation in Redang Island off the east coast of Peninsula Malaysia we enjoyed snorkeling in the clear waters. There were abundant fish life and in some places numerous reefs. My 7 year old is an accomplished swimmer and skin diver. Here is a painting I completed of her joyously exploring the ocean.


It took me 4 weeks to deal with all the jobs domestic and workplace after my holiday. Only now can I get back into painting and sculpting and all things creative.

Sketch club May

After a long hiatus I managed to make the sketch club at Art Est and found that all the participants have changed. I shouldn't be surprised I know. Our model was Elly a former dancer and an older woman. She was very graceful.


However the suburb suffered a blackout with the result that Elly was without her heaters and electric blanket and had to be clothed! I thought this an opportunity to draw a portrait.


Eventually the power came back on and she did the last pose nude. Sarah the convenor was evidently frustrated with her efforts as she considered a new hobby. Well none of us were particularly good mainly because we haven't been practicing.