Creek walk

With my exhibition date looming (7 Sep) and my intention to title it "from the desert to the sea", I realised with a jolt that I only have 3 desertscapes completed. This led to a panic attack and the commencement of a fourth painting.


This one was inspired by a walk we did at the base of King's Canyon. It is a gentle walk, leading to a sheer rock escarpment. At that point, braver and fitter souls could venture up a million steps to the top of the table. This walk went through very lush landscape, surprisingly thick in parts, due to the phenomenal rainfall enjoyed last year. The creek was dry but the eucalypts were plentiful, their smooth white trunks contrasting with the red earth.

Not the way home: 13 artist paint the desert

Last Saturday we made it to the SH Erwin gallery at Observatory Hill for the exhibition titled "Not the way home: 13 artist paint the desert". As regular readers may know, I have been struggling with desertscapes ever since my brief trip to Uluru last Oct. I thought that perhaps I could get some ideas from the exhibition. Alas, the desert in the subject was quite different from that of Central
Australia. 13 artists were taken to Broken Hill for 2 weeks and asked to make a body of work in response.
Broken Hill may be desert but it's not as arid so there is quite a lot of vegetation. In fact it looks a lot like my friends' farm in Young. The colours are grey green and brown not vivid reds and ochres.

Steve Lopes painted various industrial junk discarded to rust slowly. He included figures in these pictures but they appear quite awkward, some bang right in the centre of a picture, in an unharmonious composition.

My favourite was Bonfire by Euan Macleod. It centred around a bonfire in the desert at twilight or sunrise. The shadows are long and the figures are warming themselves. The fire looked really warm and inviting. I also liked the sun hitting the hills behind.

Guy Warren painted a beauty in Forgotten Singers, Forgotten Songs 2. This is an abstract but the colours are great. The blue and orange zinged.

It was quite a good collection, and even included a ceramic sculptor Merran Esson. Merran's work reflected corrugated iron structures, she even used copper glaze for that green tinge of oxidized copper.