Progress

It has been a prolific painting period for me, prompted by the course at Art Est. Woke up early yesterday in an effort to paint these roses before they wilted.


And then I went with my new sky painting to class to take advantage of the fact that Carla's speciality is beautiful skies. Colour matching is the challenge. Clouds are pretty hard to depict. On Carla's advice I am posting this as a 'progress' shot. It's not finished yet although hubby thinks it time to hang already!

The Blue Mountains

Most Sydney-siders would have been up the Blue Mountains, and right around the mid mountains, stood on the edge of the cliff to peer at the stupendous vista unfolding; range upon range vanishing into the hazy distance. Truly the Blue Mountains is our own Grand Canyon - and it's so accessible, really.


Well this week I decided to try and capture the feel. I had purchased a heavy gel medium and thought to try palette knifing it on the canvas to create the texture of rock face. First painted both rock face with exactly the same colours. Then knocked back the one further away using glazes. Transparent white gives that effect of distance which is so lovely.

More Moreton bay figs

I've been invited to exhibit with the Inner West Art Group at Gallery NTK Croydon on the 8 Dec. As a consequence I've been busily painting.


This diptych was inspired by the impressionists who frequently painted figures with their backs to the light. The deep shadows are actually not conducive to the modern art of photography. But the eye does not suffer from the same problem!

Moreton Bay Figs are some of my favourite trees. Their trunks have this human limb like quality. And they are such magnificent trees, casting deep shade on hot summer days.

Glazing techniques

This term I've enrolled in the Contemporary landscape painting course at Art Est. Our tutor Carla is a kiwi painter well regarded for her beautiful skies. Carla promised to teach me how to glaze. I've often wondered how the Dutch masters get their luminescent effect. The answer it seems is the patient application on multiple layers of thinly diluted colour in a glaze medium.


Great isn't it? It looks almost renaissance and a landscape of Europe rather than the Cook river in Sydney.

To get an effect of deep shadows which are usually purple, glaze alternate layers of ultramarine and magenta. Both colours must be transparent for it to work. Glazing allows the colours to be optically mixed on the canvas.

To knock back a colour eg green so that it recedes, glaze with orange ( its complementary colour). I'm quite thrilled with this effect, just have to experiment a bit more.

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.

Expressive colour ala Bonnard

After copying the Gaugain painting the next logical step is to use a palette that I admire in one of my own compositions. The painting I chose was 'Regatta'. The main colours were green and yellow/ orange.


Unfortunately the orange looked ghastly so I reverted to ochre. This is incomplete as I still have people to put under the stairs but I post it up to show what the experiment yielded. More on this later.

Expressive colour workshop

Attended a really interesting workshop at Art Est today on expressive colour. Thus far, I have not been adventurous with colours, sticking to real life colours. But Ochre who runs the workshop introduced us to the world of colours using Gauguin and Bonnard as examples.

I had done some colour theory previously but this reinforced what I remembered. We spend a couple of hours looking at the colour wheel. Then we made our own using warm and cool primaries. I learnt that the paintings were so vibrant because of the way they placed complementary colours next to each other. Red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange : they weren't afraid of contrast!

Finally we copied a piece to learn the colours it used. Here is my attempt at copying Gauguin.

Final painting term 1

Having purchased a water proof camera, I have enjoyed photographing favourite places under water. Some viewpoints above water can only be taken with an underwater camera because it is necessary to get wet! Like this painting I did from a photo of Wylies.


For the final class this term, at Tim's insistence I brought a larger canvas. This one is probably 60x75. And due to it's size and despite starting it at home, I failed to complete it in class. Here it is, several days late. Does it give the viewer a feeling of a sunny day swimming in lovely turquoise waters?

Happiness is jumping the waves

Inspired by John Hammond's book on impressionist acrylic painting, I decided to paint children jumping waves at the beach. An joyous past time : I've indulged with my own child in the past. Of course she is now a fabby doo swimmer who freestyles past old mum and is now more likely to dive into the waves than to jump them.


Tim says I've to apply paint on the figures using a palette knife. I'm saying what? How? This technique definitely blends colous on the canvas. I now realise that this is how Nicholas Harding does his paintings. The strokes are more three dimensional and it's a great way to paint. I shall be doing more palette knife painting from now on.

Rocks at Coogee

This week I was teased about not finishing a painting.... just wasn't in the zone, you know.  Anyway, I did what I could.  The waterways was tricky because there were so many colours in reality and you can also see the vegetation underneath.  Unfortunately, I glazed it with the wrong blue colour (!) and then had to do a repair job.  This is not complete, as there are figures I want to work in but overall, I'm happy with the colours of the rocks and their texture. 

Nude coloured in

Found a spare few hours to paint in the nude. I've rendered her with brown and blue and it looks surprisingly good.


The colour scheme remains low key but it is now not monochromatic. Is she looking out for a lover? Or just wistful?

Jacqui wistful

As an experiment I took one of my life drawings to class to translate to a painting. The brief was to convey the wistful mood of the model as she looks out the window. I wanted a high contrast between light from the window and the gloom of the room.


The result was not entirely satisfactory as it looked like a monochromatic painting. I hesitate to put flesh coloured highlights and as I've been frantic at work, I've done nothing more to it. My classmate Tony offered to buy it as he wants to pass it off as his own to his wife!

Rough seas

This week I chose another aspect of the ocean to attempt: rough sea with lots of movement and foam. Roger and I had been for a walk from Coogee to Clovelly and walked through the baths at North Coogee. I hadn't been there before and was amazed to see these brave or fool hardy souls diving in and swimming to the rocks. That is Roger on the left with his hat on.


There was another girl who was too terrified to join her friends. Wedding cake island is in the distance. Tim says that I'm doing the right thing by exploring one subject. However next week I will get into country landscape. What I'm amazed by is the speed that I've been painting. Every Tuesday I emerge with a painting after 4 hours effort. I often feel drained but exulted that I managed to get so far. When I'm home I tend to potter around, spend lots of time thinking about composition, stop often for breaks, etc. Rarely was I able to complete anything in a day! I believe that speed is probably good as if it is doomed to fail it would be evident after 4 hours.

Swimmer and water play

Today at the acrylic studio I took the problem of painting water to Tim. I used a photo of a swimmer in the ocean from Sally's blog as reference. The results were unexpectedly good. Of course I asked Tim numerous questions about colours and mixing. Tim has a great box of paints and rather than teaching us to mix he said to use those. But I wasn't going to purchase 20 new colours to reproduce the same results at home! He showed me a few mixes and I had to get phalto green to mix cobalt.

Rockpool at Little Bay

For a long time now, I've been fascinated by rockpools. Sydney rockpools are beautiful because of the Hawkesbury sandstone. However I have struggled to produce a likeness. Things submerged look different but how to represent them? This was the problem I brought to Tim Gratten, artist and tutor at Art Est. Here is his response.


The colours I needed were yellow oxide and red oxide to render the stones. The submerged rocks had a wash of the blue over it. I was pleased with the results. Here is a close up.