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.