The majesty of distant purple peaks and the confident parallel trunks of the native eucalyptus. The lakes and dams are the perfect mirror to playback the unfolding narrative.
As the year draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what a great year it has been both personally and professionally. My visit to Queensland and the Pacific Rim was very memorable and prompted me to finish the year with this piece.
Happy Birthday to my favorite darling @debbiemackinnon
Making a home made card has become one of those yearly traditions that I really enjoy! This one, the twisting coastal pathways of the north Cornwall coast and soft North Atlantic lighting.
Here’s to future journeys, learnings and travel together.
Exploring the intersection of geometry and landscape. Using charcoal and gouache, I’m keeping the colour palette concise. What begins as a preliminary study evolves into a work that quickly establishes its own identity.
Based on pleinair sketches from both Tasmania and Cornwall, the patterns of fields meeting the coastline quickly converts to geometric abstraction.
A selection of my trees (Christmas trees) are part of the end of year group show @workingdog.gallery until 19 December and tomorrow there’s drinks with the artists. I will be at the gallery from 2-3pm. Why not come along and have a look.
Earthworks explores the quiet dialogue between land and human gesture – abstracted landscapes shaped not only by weather, time and terrain, but by the subtle traces of our own intervention. These works hint at roads, cuttings, scars and structures half-lost to memory, where geometry meets erosion and the seen meets the unseen. In these works, landscape becomes both witness and collaborator, revealing the marks we leave and the stories the earth continues to rewrite.
I have always enjoyed working with other artists, teaching and guiding them in various mediums, one of my favourites being gouache. It is often misunderstood by artists, uncertain how to mix the paint and use its unique properties, translucency through to opacity, to great advantage. Last year I started running either small group or individual gouache workshops actually in my studio. So the artist(s) get to be amongst all my own work and have full access to my sketchbooks and preliminary artworks as they experiment and learn. It’s been a lot of fun.
@andrew.duffin.art is an artist who has just finished the three part workshop, with great results. Here’s just a snapshot of his progress. I have been very impressed how quickly he let go of a tightness in his mark making in favour of a more fluid expression of brushstrokes. They say that all artists and creative practitioners need 10,000 hours to become accomplished in their chosen art form…Andrew, you are certainly well on your way! Keep it going and stay in touch.
I have a small, exclusive collection of landscapes (8 paintings) now with Becker Minty as part of their Christmas curation. Here’s just three of the nine works at the gallery.
1 On Track Acrylic on canvas 63 x 63cms
2 Steps Beyond The Horizon Acrylic on canvas 102 x 102cms
3 Moments Turn To Hours Acrylic on canvas 63 x 63cms
Could make a perfect Christmas present or why not a well deserved end of year/holiday season gift for yourself.
You can view the complete selection @beckerminty
Or if you are in the Potts Point neighborhood pop in and take a look.
Contact JoshuaC@beckerminty.com for further details.
Abstraction tips the perceived landscape into a more complex and often incoherent representation of subject. It shifts realities, challenges a natural beauty and creates an altogether polarising actuality. Just a few of the reasons that it appeals to me.
My new series of landscape geometry or Angular Landscapes is based less on a natural beauty of place but more on the interactions of colour and shape. And herein lies the challenge…they keep moving, the painting keeps moving. I continually overpaint, add and take out until a certain balance and resolution seems to settle across the work and it feels right to leave it alone. It is much more about instinct than understanding.
The geometry of the landscape is formed in many ways.
Weather patterns play a continual role in shaping the topography. Palimpsest, the term often applied to landscapes in which traces of earlier arrangements can be seen amongst and below the modern pattern of fields and topography. A geographical feature composed of super imposed structures created at different times.
The light itself shifts patterns in and out of prominence and decades of consistent non- reversible ploughing creates a highly distinctive, undulating geometric pattern in the landscape known as ridge and furrow.
Following on from my Unseen Landscapes work earlier this year, I like the ability to make abstract elements relate and seemingly communicate with each other in an intimate way. And the idea that colour is an essential part of the work and how the ratio of its mass is relative to other colours in the arrangement.
Part of a new body of work, whereby the marks left by human intervention as well as nature taking its course, reveals an interesting geometry.
The variation in soil colour visible on the surface of ploughed fields, that for decades has been toiled time and time again, gives the land surface a corrugated topography.
And thrilled that this one has already found a new home. SOLD.
Rhythms Of Distance Acrylic on canvas 115 x 115cms
A quick gouache study of the little Blue Lake, here in north west Tasmania. Loose fluid marks to define the trees growing out of the cliff face above the incredible colour of the lake.
The last pleinair session as our art workshop @artablestudios comes to a close with many of the artists yearning for another week!!! What great energy!
Well, what a busy and inspiring week with our fifteen artists @artablestudios in Winnaleah. Here’s one piece from each artist and just look at the diversity of execution, each piece reflecting the personality and instinctive mark making of individual participants.
Stunning sessions of pleinair painting out in the landscape and a generous studio for time to think and play with ideas.
Great energy and commitment from everyone has made this workshop an absolute joy! Thank you artists for your commitment and desire to take risks. Partner @debbiemackinnon and I have really learnt a lot from guiding and working with you.
Once again, the delicious food and warm hospitality from Gillian and Steve and all the team @enclave.tasmania has been second to none.
Looking forward to working with an artist tomorrow and coaching him through the use of gouache. It’s a very flexible medium and once you’ve mastered the way colours can overlay and reactivate with one over the other, the potential for developing highly finished work is limitless.
A few examples:
1 Last light across the bay, NSW Central Coast 2 Taverna time, Skopelos 3 Shadowplay on the harbour, Alonissos
Thrilled to be heading back to Winnaleah in Tasmania at the end of next week for another wonderful art workshop with @artablestudios
With partner @debbiemackinnon we will be guiding and encouraging our group of artists to capture some of the magic of this stunning part of Tassie! The locations are truly amazing and the small selection shown here are places which I am looking forward to revisiting.
If you are one of the artists joining us, you are in for a very exciting and stimulating time. Staying @enclave.tasmania where the hospitality is second to none, I’m looking forward to working with you all…it’s going to be a lot of fun!
When you look past the immediate fidelity of the observed view, a more constructed geometry becomes apparent. A world that lies visibly about us, if we are prepared to perceive it.
Tracks, broken fences and the marks of human intervention play an important part in forming an identity of place.
The limited palette is intentional as is my choice of medium, gouache, which helped in working with a sense of immediacy in the mark making.
Trees never fail me. Their majesty, their quiet strength, wisdom and connection to the earth and sky. In such uncertain times, I can only see them as symbols of hope and resilience.
Swipe to see a detail of foliage in the tree canopy, the initial underpainting and an early compositional sketch.
It just needed a few tweaks, particularly to the distant mountain rim. It’s been watching me from the corner of the studio for the past couple of months, as I’ve been pressing on with a large commission and this morning I decided to get it back on the easel. Swipe for details.
One of those moments when you stop, take a deep breath and take it all in. A brief interlude that doesn’t last for long.
The last light playing through the foliage as the distant mountains of Queensland’s Scenic Rim fade into lilac. See previous posts for my under painting and my study made on location.
Hidden Creek Cabins Acrylic on canvas 104 x 104cms
