We are now settled into our new house at Appila, a lovely old stone homestead recently split from the family farm and with 15 acres of land.

The studio is magnificent – the length of the old part of the house and divided into a large studio and a smaller room for my computer – windows facing west all down one wall, with good neutral coloured, lined curtains and a big old airconditioner, a large south facing window to paint by, and an east facing window opening onto one of those bull-nose verandahs. Also, a lovely old floral carpet! I’m currently continuing with a balloon sculptor painting I started ages ago and much better for the long break from it.

There are multiple sheds – one for me, one for Ken, a gigantic one for Ken, plus an implement shed, a SHEARING SHED (!!) and several older ones, all bent tin and rotten wood and, pending a clearing sale, the huge shed still contains an ancient yellow grader, massive against the high back wall. It will be photographed all over and is a very imminent painting.

Beyond rutted, muddy puddles and piles of old fencing wire, looking west, is a vast expanse of flattish paddock rising to distant hills. I can see the whole sky. All of it.

Unfortunately, the grass is still green.

Have just spent the very long cold spell working on the current commission which is now, at last, very nearly finished. It goes to a framer on Monday and then, if all goes well, off to its new home in Melbourne. It will have taken nearly two and a half months.

Like all my work, this painting dropped into the doldrums for a while but is emerging strongly and, with nowhere to go apart from down another magnificent gorge, again, or for a haircut 230 Kms away, focusing on it day after day has enabled me to work through the problems rather than avoid them by adding or changing bits. Now that the end approaches, however, as in all my paintings of machinery, insoluble compositional flaws caused by errant pipes or awkward lumps of metal get painted out, though they are probably essential for an engine to run.

This one, like the previous two, also includes the patron, visiting. A bit like the moving paintings in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.

We suddenly decided it was time to move and everything (except the Terex Truck that I was working on at the time) was abandoned as we redecorated the house and looked for another one, which fortunately we found, further North, about 80 Kms east of Port Pirie, a lovely old stone homestead with a wing added on, facing south and perfect for my studio. We move in on 31 July but, in the meantime, while the Mannum house is on the market, are living at Blinman in the Flinders Ranges, with no phone and the nearest reasonable shop 110 kms away.

Having hesitated for a very long time about where to go with galleries I was approached a few days ago by a new gallery in Singapore, associated with top range galleries in Hong Kong and Sydney. Maybe!

The studio at Blinman (the third bedroom) faces south, looking across open land to the village. Painting in there is such a pleasure! I am currently working on a commission, with another one planned after that, but hope to finish the busker sometime in the middle, having worked on it, on and off, for a very long time. There is also another wall and truck painting that is itching to get itself started. Soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.