Days of leisure

Recently attended a work conference at Coogee and visited the north Coogee baths. This is a narrow strip of rocks sheltering a glorious little bay.



I spied this girl floating on her back and just enjoying the waters on a hot spring day. She was probably a university student or backpacker - what a life!

People in landscape

On a stinker of a day I attended a workshop by Kerrie Lester a well known expressive painter.


It was quite fabulous despite the heat. The main advice I took home was to work the entire painting and no outlines etc. People should be incorporated in the picture from the start and not plopped in as an afterthought. Also being expressive means to interpret what you feel from the scene. The freedom to actually paint gesturally - I always thought that my life drawing was best when it was gestural. No need for fine detail- leave it to the viewer to fill in the dots.

The added bonus is that it's finished so quickly- I actually did two and gave myself an early mark to recover from the heat.

Miniature paintings

We are doing a stall at the school fete in a weeks time. My friend Cecile suggested that I paint a series of small canvases and sell them at the fete as a test. Good idea I think and bought 20 x 25 cm canvases. These are small but not minuscule.

Since they are small they shouldn't take long and therefore can be priced low, right? Wrong! Even with small canvases, there needs to be planning and perspective etc. You save on paint I guess and time taken to cover larger areas but really no saving on composition and colour mixing.

The good thing is they serve as a test bed for ideas before launching into a larger canvas. The term 'study' comes to mind. I took about 90mins for each one. How much should I sell them for?