New work since June

I have been working away at these images since returning from a holiday in July - ink and crayon, each A3 size. Some I will work up into a larger painting. You may notice the shadowing on the right hand side - it is of me holding my mobile phone taking these photos.

Some of these are images hanging with friends at the back of Mullumbimby and some on Heron Island. The second one below is the boy and I taking the screws out of the camper door from a cupboard that was completely smashed by robbers in a break in. My camera was stolen and I haven't replaced it, hence I'm using the 2 mega pixel phone camera reflected in the water below.




































The family images are from photos taken at Wilson's creek with my Panasonic Lumix - oh waht a lovely travelling camera that was.

Some of these images I will work up into large paintings, when I get a straight run of time committed to the process. But first I am itching to get going on a painting of the kids in a boat at Brunswick Heads.

Foetal work

Over the two month break I began working on my own experience, rather than painting family members in the landscape.

I started with my birth and this one is the second version, with references to both Bacon and Picasso but finally in a language of my own. It's about 6'x4' and took me an afternoon to do, it is both beautiful and horrifying and I can now hardly bare to look at it.

This was the first version with the giant forceps below, about 6'x4', seemed to take forever and still it looks too pre-meditated, and has none of the 'ouch' that the one above gives me.














Out of this process I started to form this poignant image of a new born in a sky of black on a 2'x2' sized canvas. And that is my next step - to work out how to make my blacks more luminous and then put this little figure at the bottom of a huge canvas.

Captivating seascape

Some work to do on the distant edge of the sea, feathering the edge will do it. Otherwise good work.

Recent work

Final version of Archie with a better photo of the canvas.















Influence of Picasso's Beach figures on Francis Bacon's work. That's Bacon with the beach figure both in the background and curling around his right hand. Both figures are reaching for a ball, in the background the ball is in the corner of the door, and on his hand between index and middle finger. I've made a number of other quotations of Bacon's signature devices. The great man is having a retrospective at the Tate late 2008, moving to Moma in 2009.















Glorious national parks, this one at Shark's beach with one member of a commercial fishing crew on watch up the ladder. On this day the ice maker in town was broken and so the crew behind the figures on the beach, had to wait for the ice to come before casting their nets.












The pool portrait from last year, latest version almost right.