In Western Australia over Christmas I nutted out the logistics of how to paint from life...i.e. what do re water and brushes and paints and cleaning up without a house to do it in. How to actually paint from life in terms of what ways to paint I still have a lot of learning and exploring to do. Here are a few efforts. The first three are from life, and the last four from memory, variation on a theme, the very last using reference photos as a starting point.

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In my Gallery you can catch up on the most recent paintings.
Hill house, is one where the colours vibrate against each other. If I keep looking at it, it seems to separate into layers and become 3D with the white floating above the rest, and the pink hill becoming see-through like ice. Very exciting!

I’ve also been enjoying using gesso to create a lot of texture...I love its whiteness and thickness.
Spring - there is a lot of texture to the surface of this painting.
There is one tiny canvas on the easel at the moment - it is painted green and I don’t know where it will go from here...

I have spent most of the day designing six postcards of individual paintings to distribute here and there in cafes and the like. The feedback from the exhibition (Kerry Millard- Unplugged, Unframed, and ever-so-slightly Unhinged) has been so wonderful that I want to share the paintings further and hopefully bring people to the gallery here.

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Pearl River

I was a bit scared to start painting again after weeks of preparing for the exhibition and its launch- hard to explain why. What if I start trying too hard? What if I can’t paint anything? What if don’t know what to paint? What if it’s all rubbish?...
So, one day I bought some more canvases. Another day I got as far as putting on my overalls. Finally I picked up the brush and begant by playing around with a painting I’d already started, using it as a base. AND...I discovered amongst my paints a tube of opalescent orange- which looks pearly actually - and while part of me was saying it’s too gimmicky, the rest of me wanted to dive into it! I love how, as in reality, light hits it and you can see it from some angles and not others.

I was also busting to try to capture the seabed/moonscape which is nearby bush after hazard reduction burns have removed all but the trees. It is hauntingly disturbing and beautiful...which I hesitate to admit of something that represents destruction and a lot of loss of life of wildlife. It occurs to me that it may also resonate because the effect is similar to winter in Canada - undergrowth hidden under snow, only trunks emerging. This is actually the opposite - where everything is blown away and the bare bones and hidden secrets are revealed.

This one was very patterned - I like it but wanted to try a different direction.


Smoothed out a bit - removed a lot of the leaves to reflect the barren feel, even though in reality there are lots of fallen dead and burned leaves.

After The Burn
Final version, although I think I’ll do another where I go back the the earlier style with the patterned feel.

India
And a whole lot of fun. Bits of patterns extend around onto the sides.

Lately I’ve been enjoying using dabs of paint for reflections in water, or cobblestones, and suddenly felt like trying to make a painting as if it were woven. It was always fun at school when we wove paper strips together and I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to paint that way. I decided to do a rural scene, and simply started at the top. I did a checkerboard painting, then had fun filling in the remaining white squares trying to make a ploughed field, pond, cloud, hillside, house and barn. It was challenging and satisfying choosing the colour for each square so it added to the picture and played against the other squares. To me it is weaving, but it seemed familiar in a way which I couldn’t quite place...then realised: any kid today would say it’s pixillated!

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This painting was inspired by the view from the escalator in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I intended originally to paint a very simplified picture.





I started with a full palette then reduced it to yellow, violet and blue to pull the painting together better. I darkened the sky, then added detail to it, then made it quite a bit more dramatic.




I had light spilling onto the pavement from two windows but today realised I’d used a cartoon technique and had represented the light by a yellow glow. If you think about it, you can’t actually see light like that. Where it falls you can see the objects it falls on in their full colours, and where it doesn’t fall you see shadows with less or no colour. By knocking the glow back the emphasis is now more on the sky and chimneys, and on the faces of the buildings which delighted me so much. Now there are two theatres of interest- one up on the rooftops, the other way below in the street.

Paris

It looks better in the flesh (and at 102 cm x 102 cm the detail is easier to see)...here are a couple of photos of detail to show you what I mean.

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I think I’d like to try the view again with a really really simplified version, almost geometric. Hmmm...isn’t that where I started last time?

I’m busy making paintings for my upcoming exhibition in September. There are already quite a few which you can find in the gallery, but I’ll let you in on some of my recent discoveries!

I did a little one which didn’t work (which was painted over another one which didn’t work), turned it on its side and thought it looked like rush hour, worked on it but realised that it still wasn’t working because when I sat it beside another painting, I had no desire to look at it! It began to feel pretentious in that it depended on its title...so I decided to run white brushstrokes down to be trees, leaving bits of pattern showing through the white to be the bark. I discovered, though, that I preferred to leave strips of pattern as the trees themselves. I painted blue and white between to be blue snow and white sky (It was white snow and blue sky but I preferred it upside down). I loved it! I loved how the patterns on the trees are reminiscent of First Nations art in Canada. I’ve called it “Birch trees” because birches have such wonderful bark. I was really excited to paint a much bigger version....



I covered the next canvas (102 cm x 102 cm) with colourful patterns, just wallowing in colour. It seemed too bright, so I softened it with blue mixed with white. Still too bright so used a small roller to make greenish grey strips.









Turned on its side, it was then ready for me to apply white paint leaving strips of colour for the trees.



Some of the colour bled through from behind, so I went over the white again to make it cleaner.

At this stage I decided I preferred it with the colour bleeding through, so added touches of blue and green and yellow between the trees. Also, a friend thought the white was the trees, so I added one small branch to give a clue. At the same time, I’m learning to embrace ambiguity...it is nice if you imagine you’re looking at a colourful landscape from between white trees.

Incidentally, the tree in the middle has been felled by a beaver.

Next I wanted to do a second painting in the same way but where there would be white trees against a tapestry background, the way my friend saw the first painting.











I didn’t get a photo when I had turned it on its side and painted white strips for trees- they just didn’t work. I also found TRYING to do the same kind of painting as the one before really exhausting- the first one had been so fun - I discovered that painting is all about invention as I had to think up what to do next at each stage. I LOVE inventing. So I decided to take a whole different tack and added a few things...




The slender trees in the foreground give it a lot more interest and personality, and the highly patterned background becomes almost an afterthought, and so quite tantalising. I played with twilight sky between the branches, interlacing twigs, foreground grasses, bringing the white down to the bottom of the painting, adding little details to the bark...really learned a lot.

What I learned:

If you don’t want to look at a painting it is probably not working for you!

If it needs its title to be something it is probably not working.

Paint over stuff you don’t think is working.

Try things. Change things. Turn things upside down and sideways.

Let some things be ambiguous! This is hard for me because in my usual work as a cartoonist and illustrator, being ambiguous is failure.

Wipe the paint off your hands before using light switches.

Having my first embossed cover (My Sister Has a Big Black Beard)... (with raised splats that you can feel)... inspired me to write this poem:

Embossing, while trendy and cool,
Was something she scorned, as a rule.
For lumps, blips and bumps
She required no thumps,
Just soaking, till pruned, in her pool

Don’t worry, the poems which Duncan wrote for the book are much better!!!!!

My Sister Has Big Black Beard is all finished now, and here is the final final cover!!



I have a lot of bits and pieces to catch up on since being away for three weeks, and then...I wonder what the NEXT project will be???!!!!

And the winner is...........







Using this background and other odds and ends, the cover has finally been all put together and sent off...and approved...so now Duncan Ball and I sit back and wait to look at the final version of it and the internal illustrations before they are sent off to the printer who will go mad and make thousands of books.

It’s scary knowing that if there is a mistake, it turns into thousands of mistakes...so a this stage everybody is looking with eagle-eyes for anything not quite right. It’s still amazing how things can slip through, though.

So...although this is just a rough rough version and the writing on the back is not exactly what will be there and is all messy because it got wrecked with some sticky tape, here is the cover!!! YAY!!!!!