07 March 10
Figures at the Mannum Show
Left the busker alone for a while to get on with the dump truck (91 x 112 cm), which is going so well that I’ve abandoned everything else to push it to a swift conclusion. It is a wonderful, ancient, battered Terex dump truck, a faded green. I am very tempted to offer it for private sale.
Did take a couple of hours off to go to the Mannum Show in the hopes of photographing something good (like the old woman sitting alongside the diesel truck, who had been judging Miss Mannum Showgirl several years ago) but the best I could find was a livestock truck tucked away behind a shed, where I could crouch down and photograph the front axle without being seen, but unfortunately it had a leaf sprung suspension rather than a coil so the shape of the axle itself was completely different to one on the dump truck, part of which had been obscured behind a sheet of metal. Having finally worked out how the rear axle of a truck goes together, I’m now starting all over again on the front. Google never has quite the right image.
Decided to add a man digging to the dump truck. If anyone has the time, try feeding ‘man digging’ into Google Images. Every single image was of a man posed holding a spade, or pretending to dig but turning back and smiling! So, it was back to husband, Ken, who contorted himself into a pose that I thought looked like he was digging though he had great difficulty not falling over. The photos were terrific.
After the dump truck, hopefully I will be able to finish the busker, but will probably pack my paints and go up to Blinman to work on a little (71 x 71 cm)tar truck.
If anyone was looking for this blog while the link to my database was down, my apologies. The website Host I use was upgrading itself, changed all the links and I didn’t get it right.
15 February 10
Dump truck at Leigh Creek coalfields - figure added to scale
I have finally, at last, replaced every single tube of paint with the Lefranc and Bourgeois range. Thick, chunky tubes, dense with rich, solid pigment. Wonderful. I had no idea what a huge difference it would make - Windsor and Newton (artists’ range) and Art Spectrum (also artists’ range), neither of them cheap, having become progressively thinner, oilier and sloppier with every batch I bought.
A good link - I got the Lefranc paint from The Art Shop at www.theartshop.com.au - it costs less buying Lefranc from them than Art Spectrum does (both in 40ml tubes) from an artists retail shop. They also stock all of the Neef 95 stiff synthetic range of brushes.
Ken having accumulated some holiday leave, we have just taken a long break. A week in the Grampians as we’d never been before. Went over to Halls Gap and got some terrific photos of the laughing clowns there - so sinister it might be hard to use them without them appearing ‘made up’. Then a week at Blinman in the Flinders. Went out to Leigh Creek coalfields for the first time, and there was a wonderful dump truck plus various other bits of machinery. After which we still had time to do absolutely nothing for a while. Back to the busker now and planning another, smaller dump truck (not the one from Leigh Creek).
The current plan is to accumulate paintings for a show with Bridget McDonnell Galleries later this year/early next, maybe an entry for the Blake Prize, but if you want to see what’s coming up, just send me an email.
20 January 10
Farina in sunshine after some rain
After almost exactly three months working on just the one painting, A Pile of Crashed Cars was finished and sent to its new home last week leaving the studio in such a mess that it’s been hard to know where to start clearing it up. A couple of garbage bags helped but the countless images I used for the Crashed Cars which were piled up everywhere, mostly stuck together with the masking tape I used to stick them to the canvas while I referred to them, got filed under Crashed Cars with all the of the images, as I never know when I might use them again.
I did take four days off just after Christmas and went to Blinman to clear my brain out. Took a great many more photos of Farina while I was there, but unfortunately it had rained a lot and the whole area was covered in a greyish green weed so that, although the structures themselves were as exciting as before, the overall effect was drab. Then spent a long time trying to get rid of the green with Photoshop without any success, and it probably doesn’t matter anyway. I shall certainly be using a lot of the images in future.
Got out the busker painting I had started a long time ago and put it up on the easel, where it looks tiny (107 x 122 cm) after the Crashed Cars (140 x 180cm). Hopefully it will be easier and I can start churning them out just like everybody else.
04 January 10
Shop dummies in Rundle Mall
Weeks and weeks went by. I took 3 days off for Christmas but, at long last, the pile of cars is very nearly finished. It will have taken nearly 3 months and has been such hard work, painting to order on a canvas more than 60% larger than I have ever used before. But the painting works! Barring accidents and last-minute changes, it is off to Melbourne in the van next week and will appear on this website soon thereafter.
The new picture framer did all that he said he could, and then charged me $433, three times what it had been costing before! If I went into a furniture shop and spent $433 I would expect to get a LOT more than 4 lengths of stained, machined timber joined together. Tremendously special timber, and so very expensive. Tasmanian oak - you can buy strips of it in Bunnings for $10.
Really looking forward to some smaller works and more assemblages. There is such a feeling of peace at the end of a particularly difficult painting, knowing all the angst is nearly over and I will soon be free to paint lighter things. Even though they all, every single one of them, become equally angst-ridden at the end, I still have a naive belief that the next one will be different.
Found a pile of steel letter stencils (used on wool bales) in a junk shop in Mannum and they will appear somewhere sometime. They are blackened, slightly battered, strong and sharp. There is another busker and a different tar truck on the way, too.
26 November 09
Figureheads at the Port Adelaide Maritime Museum
Rain came with the cooler weather, and downgraded our massive barley crop from malting grade to animal feed. Ho hum. The trees grew.
The pile of cars is now progressing steadily towards a (distant!) conculsion. Stronger, much more colour and every day I feel confident to start the next section. New paintings are piling up in my head, ready to burst forth in the new year.
Found a new framer today, after husband Ken asked me to accompany him to Adelaide to look at an off-road motorbike for Blinman, just in case he wanted to ride it home, but when the bike proved to be too underpowered to outperform a truck tanking along the highway (apparently it’s no fun if one of those overtakes you, poodling along on a 250cc motorbike), just in case a highway needed to be ridden along on said off-road bike, we then went hunting down a particularly good picture framer, who might make exactly what I want, AND HE WILL!!! Not only that, but I can make an appointment to take a painting in, go away for several large cups of coffee and return to pick it up, resplendant in its new frame. Bliss.
12 November 09
Farina. Dust storm approaching
It is very, very hot but Ken installed a new air conditioner for me and I press on. We live in the lee of the Mount Lofty Ranges and are always about 4 degrees hotter than Adelaide, so it’s been up in the 40’s all week.
The pile of cars got completely redrawn a couple of days ago and is, at last, taking shape. Plans are also under way for a number of smaller works, but not yet.
Back to it.
27 October 09
Going for a nice family walk at Blinman
A lot of time passed. The commissioned truck painting, 6 Trucks got finished, so I drove over to Melbourne and delivered it, calling in to see the Bridget McDonnell Gallery while I was there. A lovely, comfortable space. Bridget kindly agreed to hang my work if I ever get enough together.
So, I bought a lot of smaller stretchers with the aim of actually enjoying myself, but first got on with the next commission, an 140 x 180 cm pile of cars. It is very difficult. The Flinders Ranges are already creeping in across the skyline.
Also started putting together the necessities to set up a studio at Blinman though some friends went up there during the October long weekend and it was, apparently, full of motorbikes and 4wd’s now that the 120 km road from Hawker in the south is sealed and there were tents crammed everywhere, even on the soft shoulder, right alongside the road. The weather up there has been as atrociously cold and wet as it has been in South Australia and Victoria.
17 September 09
Bundle of Wire. An idea for the 3rd entry for the Duke Prize
Time passed. There were three competitions to enter during late August and September, which got in the way of finishing the truck painting, but that is fast approaching the end and I’m very happy with the way it’s going. I shall probably drive over to Melbourne and have a short holiday with it.
Sent off an entry to the Stan and Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize (non-acquisitive $10,000) yesterday. The entry form allowed for 3 entries and I had assumed they meant you could enter 3 if you wanted to. Not so. You HAD to enter 3, nominating one as the preferred entry. Fine, if you happen to have a shedful of work, which I don’t, so I added ‘Two Posts’ to my main entry, ‘Battered Sign’ and hung the sawn-off bottom of an oildrum from a chain on a hook to make the third. It came out a lot better than I had anticipated and will probably remain as a viable work.
The new house at Blinman in the Flinders Ranges is wonderful, creating an alternative working space overlooking vast vistas instead of trees, scrub, parrots and ripening barley.
24 August 09
Traffic lights below South Road
The Sign and Dropper were shortlisted for the Heysen Landscape Prize! It is so exciting getting shortlisted for a prize exhibition and so awful if you aren’t, but this time I was so it was champagne that night.
The assemblage for the Whyalla Prize is finished, ready to be photographed for the entry form tomorrow and I’m working out something else for the Duke Prize in September.
In the meantime, the truck painting is almost finished and the next one well started. It is, however, very cold, windy and wet, the light is awful and the paint won’t dry fast enough.
Gave the talk to the local CWA (Countrywomans’Association) last week, for their birthday lunch, but without the Truck painting as I’d mentioned earlier in this blog. I found myself incapable of presenting something I really cared about in a tin hut to all those old ladies. But they gave me a bottle of champage and a bunch of flowers (which the dogs destroyed) and I have heard that I went down very well. They said that I was ‘nice’. Many years ago, Ken and I used to audit CWA financial returns for which we were given either cookery books or potholders.
19 August 09
Driving South from Blinman
Having left Pivotal Gallery and moved to Dickerson Gallery, I have again found myself expected to devote all my time to producing work for a far distant exhibition to the detriment of either building my career or feeding myself. I have therefore decided to simply get on with both my painting and sculpture on my own and, by entering the more significant competitions, perhaps achieve more statewide recognition than I would by accumulating stock for an extremely remote 3 week burst of glory.
Now that I am no longer under the obligations and restrictions of gallery representation, should you wish to get in touch with me, please use the Contact page.
The house at Blinman is wonderful. The third bedroom faces south and will soon become my alternative studio once the broadband satellite dish and dog fence are installed.