Background
This series of landscape paintings began quite spontaneously mid 2004 after a period of building projects and prior to that several years of working as a layout artist. I have never worked in the landscape painting genre but I've always enjoyed looking at landscape painting and I was stimulated by the new local environment I moved to.

The collages, digital art and prints that I had made previously had a relevance because landscape was a sort of subtext in these pictures and the possibility of a logical progression to pure landscape art has always been latent. Also the pleasure of playing with landscape generating software on computer and my growing fascination of how light affects form and texture made experiments with landscape painting more compelling.

Another reason for investigating landscape painting is its somewhat degraded position in contemporary art practice. Artists who are critically favoured generally don't work in this genre because it is thought of as the subject matter favoured by the hobby painter or the gift shop painter. I had worked for several years as an adult education teacher and painting students with few exceptions chose landscape (probably because they thought it was simple) and I used to speculate what it would be like to seriously examine its possibilities in future.

Painting the local environment
The scenes that I've painted were originally within 10 minutes walk from where I live, this is not necessarily a matter of convenience because I walk to the beach regularly but the area is topographically unique. There is an elemental, geometric quality about it with roads like cut like channels through the clumps of Tea-tree and the skyline punctuated by power poles. The colours are the drab greens of southern coastal vegetation, muted yellow of the sandy soil, shades of grey for the bitumen and blue to a regularly clouded grey sky. More recently I've been attracted to aspects of the built environment such as shops, carparks, buildings and monuments.

It's never been my intention embark on a documentation of the local environment although inadvertently a sort of chronicle begins to form. The translation of the subject matter has to date been businesslike and I'm becoming aware of the need (after completing about 15 pictures) to investigate the emotional or cultural resonance of these subjects. A recent experience photographing a yard with bulldozers along busy road with the roar of hoons in hotted up cars forming a sort of aural background led me to start forming a connection that didn't quite lead to an epiphany but certainly clues to decoding the meaning of landscapes such as this although I suspect ultimately that purely visual concerns of painting will most likely prevail over sociological analysis.

I do like the vernacular aspects of an area and any editing of a scene is based on compositional needs or focus rather than editing out what isn't picturesque or non-conforming to some sort of ideal landscape - thus no gum trees with a dusty track replete with a decaying homestead. In fact there's a distinct pleasure in studying the unworthy, overlooked and banal.

Technique
I tend to document a particular composition with a digital camera, returning in different light conditions until one particular image has a tonal and colour structure that has promise. I find it useful to obliterate unnecessary detail on computer and lay a grid over the picture before printing. The printout is a guide only and the process of painting leads to improvisations and because the stippling technique is rather limited subtleties of detail, tone and colour are unavailable.

The painting style of these pictures is quite mechanical, the intention isn't to adopt a pointillist technique because I particularly like it but to use a neutral form of 'transcription' akin to a type of human inkjet printer. This is because I have never regarded myself as a painter and I've always had a preference for image making processes such as printmaking and collage which allow a certain amount of distancing. The slowness of the process is appealing, it is fundamental mark making, a meditative layering of paint rather than a highly focused effort.

Working Method
Once the canvas is gridded outlines are roughed in with the amount of detail determined by the requirements of the objects, for example a picture such as Picnic Table needed a high degree of accuracy because the perspective could be disturbing if it wasn't done properly (I got it wrong nonetheless - take a look at the roof of the building). The subject of Park was easier but I used diagonal grid lines nevertheless.

The underpainting varies, sometimes painting starts on an unprimed but sealed canvas or occasionally on a tinted primed ground. The raw linen is attractive and the unpainted area between the dots is less obtrusive than with the standard white gesso primed surface but the drawback is that a lot of paint gets sucked into the cavities of the weave slowing the painting and making crisp dots impossible.

The first layer is usually dots laid down in single colours on broad areas that define the composition without being concerned about tonal subtleties or nuances of form but I've also used the more traditional underpainting approach of blocking in the composition roughly with a large stiff brush as in Desaturated Landscape. I haven't made enough pictures using either approaches to decide which is most useful but beginning with dots means that the first phase of the picture's development is thoroughly mind numbing because decision making is pretty minimal at that stage.

Once the underpainting has dried the real business of developing the work commences. The building up of subsequent colours models the forms through tone, defines contours and sets up colour harmonies. The finishing off may involve a degree of working wet on wet paint that is more about a need to complete the work without waiting forever for each layer to dry and take advantage of moments of inspiration that tend to increase during the last phase. If the picture is heavily worked the dots may be overlaid to the degree that the first layers are almost totally obscured but in some pictures a mostly single layer is adequate, the majority of paintings vary from dense thickets of paint to virtually bald patches of raw canvas.

Logic or irrationality
Although the imagery is realistic in generally following rules of perspective, tone and colour there are elements that undermine the consistency of the pictorial space. The Black Car has several conscious lapses - the bare canvas hole in the middle distance and the overtly 2D cardboard cutout treatment of the tree trunk in the foreground can seem like such obvious mistakes that some people have suggested that correcting these 'faults' would improve the work. Another example, the brevity of the rendering of the dominant caravan/lean to features of Caravanning at Lang Lang whilst the background is given a great deal more attention seem less a mistake but recalcitrance in finishing the picture properly.

The reasons for doing this range in seriousness from examining issues of vision and violating logic to plain fun and game playing. The old art chestnut of less is more also has some bearing but it pays to be mindful that less can also be less if applied injudiciously.

Role of the grid
People who were studying or looking at art in the 1970's may detect the occasional whiff of ideas current then - serial art, process driven art and the ultimate cool conceit of the time, the grid. Without reheating some of these theories I can't deny that I'm a product of my art school upbringing and I've always loved the grid (look at Night, Drug, Springtime #4).

Fields of dots suggest optically and psychologically a latent grid lattice like the strict horizontal/vertical painting indicating the geometry of a building in Coffee at Tooradin. Some paintings originated by laying down a gridded field of neutral dots which function only to create an optical interaction or interference with the overlaid image (clearly visible in Coffee at Tooradin). The most overt use of the grid is in The Naked Christian Rock where tautly stretched string replaces the usual faintly pencilled construction grid.

The influence of printing and computer graphics
The dot/pixel is the basis of photomechanical reproduction and the arty manipulation of a brush working wet into wet paint is fundamental to painting. Using a brush for a mechanical technique is obviously contradictory but provides interesting possibilities investigating the nature of imagery. I've always enjoyed looking at enlarged photos or zooming in on computer images to the degree where the image detail dissolves into a granularity bordering on abstraction. It is the mysterious realm of the real but not real, organisation versus chaos.

Similarly, noise (a sort of semi random fuzz/pixelation employed in computer graphics) used to simulate materials in 3D modeling is fascinating theoretically and provides a useful visual analogue for constructing the paintings. The paint is generally applied in an intuitive semi random fashion but controlled enough to ultimately form fairly realistic imagery when viewed from a distance but meaningless viewed closely on the larger paintings.

The degradation caused by repeated copying using a photocopier or the white noise of a poorly tuned TV are further examples of interesting cases of images under stress that I used in earlier work and continue to explore by deliberately damaging source photos for the paintings so that detail and information are withheld forcing me to use memory or imagination to conjure what is missing or inviting the viewer to mentally fill in the vague areas of the picture surface. Noise/degradation concepts can be useful if an image looks too tidy and needs 'dirtying' to avoid sterility and lifelessness.

The final concept I'd like to discuss is Dithering, a quaint computer graphics term used to describe the interpolation of pixels from adjoining areas of tone to avoid the appearance of 'banding' - where the tonal gradation isn't entirely seamless. It is useful for a sky but enjoyable to use where it is not entirely functional, for instance to create a bleeding of colour from one object to neighbouring areas.

Noise used to simulate vegetation
Detail of 'The Black Car'
Detail of 'The Black Car' source photo treated with a Photoshop filter that simulates a colour separation

The use of photography
My earlier work in other media has always employed some type of photographic process such as photostencilled screenprints and cut up photos and photocopies in the collages, likewise the digital art that made use of scanned and digital camera images. The use of photographs is more than just a memory aid or means to bypass preliminary drawings or avoid working plein air. These paintings have a small element of testing visual reality but the focus is more on the translation from camera to paint. It is the thinking used to find a solution and the distance between the perceived reality, the lens and the final image that interests me most.

Check out some source images and compare them to the paintings.
Photo of Mornington Foreshore / Park
Photo of Mock Federation house / Mock Federation