Shadows over Bass Meadows
This is the first of the landscapes that I painted. It is based it on a digital 3D landscape that used texture maps from a photo I had taken of a section of the street in which I live. The rendering was an experiment using software that I was unfamiliar with and the results were technically crude but it nonetheless stimulated my interest in the possibilities of using the local landscape as subject matter.
 I was pleased with the composition, the roof of the house seems to float on a solid slab of tea-tree that occupies the diagonal top half of the picture and shadows from an unseen source cut horizontally across the road while power poles provide a vertical counterpoint.
 The picture reveals its computer generated origins in the strange frozen light and unnatural contours of the road and I didn't bother try to realistically indicate the intersecting road disappearing into the wall of vegetation.
 As with the other landscapes of this series the restricted palette is comprised of basic colours, oxide green, ultramarine blue, ochre, indian red, white and black. A few tiny flecks of cadmium red and scarlet are evident but I decided to eliminate these pigments for the time being.
 Some of the pictorial elements such as the house, a power pole and shadow are collaged by contour cutting the shapes from the canvas and re-inserting them pasted on balsa wood. This may seem a bit pointless but it does subtly give the image a tactile quality.

Clouds drifting over an expensive house
 This image was also originally a digital 3D landscape but notions of closely following the printed render were soon abandoned. Collaged elements such as the foreground shrub and cloud mass are given greater emphasis and sections of the image are overpainted with bands of stipple. I can't offer a sound reason for the stipple other than an investigation into subtly breaking down an image - a strategy that I played with in the Springtime on Saturn prints.
 With screen printing it is a simple matter to change the complexion of an image by overlaying a dot or line pattern and consequently the gaze of the viewer can be frustrated in attempting to resolve the underlying tones and patterns from the overprinting. It's this feature of obscuring and interfering with the logic of the picture surface that fascinates me but I've decided to refrain from using it any more because it does tend to make these paintings feel a bit contrived.

Sand, brush fence and fibro
 With this painting I decided to test the bounds of my patience by using a very fine brush. The sand, twigs and bamboo blind were collaged with the painted top half salvaged from this painstaking effort. This threatened to be an awkward solution but I found the delicacy of the paintwork sits rather nicely beside the bluntness of the collaging and it's a pleasant visual and psychological experience to look over a barrier to the world beyond.
 A note of explanation to non Australian visitors about fibro, the word is a contraction of fibro-cement sheeting (in this case asbestos) and this humble (and lethal) building material was ubiquitous in this part of the world. The irony is that the view presented in this picture is now being populated by multi-million dollar homes and that is where the brush fence, an expensive type of thatch, comes in.

Mock Federation
 The previous two pictures refer to the more affluent sections of this part of the world, Mock Federation is located in a more modest part and it also happens to be the view across the road from my place.
 Federation is a style of architecture that copies a house typical of the early 20th century when Australia became federated as a nation and it's a style scorned by people with money or an aesthetic inclination to modernism but much loved by inhabitants of the newer suburbs or with an inclination to nostalgia. The title can thus be read as having a double meaning, a mockery or a substitution.
 In this and subsequent pictures I decided to concentrate purely on the painting and put aside the collaging in order to explore the possibilities of the stippled paint technique without any distraction. The stippling in Mock Federation is very ordered and has direction according to the surface or geometry that it describes and the ultimate effect is a rigid and tightly controlled picture surface.

Bright sunlight over Constantine
 People who look closely at this picture will notice an anomaly, there is a faint shape visible beneath the paint in the bottom right hand corner. After I had taken the photo that formed the basis for this painting I noticed a maintenance worker in a pit. I speculated on the metaphoric implications, (i.e. stuck in a hole) and thought that it might be a direction in which to take this series of work, a direction not unlike the collages.
 I've always liked art that can accommodate multiple layers of meaning but started to feel unsure about this once I started this work. I felt I needed to understand more about issues related purely to painting, fundamentals such as surface, colour and optics and hence the man in the hole had to go even though there was literally a hole left in the canvas.
 Although not clearly visible in the reproduction there are blobs of orange paint splattered all over the surface that are in part overpainted or otherwise left exposed. The purpose of this strategy was to introduce a random element that would add a disruption to what is otherwise a fairly ordinary landscape. Apart from one person who thought it mucked up a perfectly acceptable painting no-one has commented on it so I gather that it is generally seen to be intrinsic.

Naked christian rock
 The name that I've given this lump of rock comes from an old man that swims naked in the mornings in this area while his equally old dog watches from the beach. This is nice and an activity I approve of but if this guy isn't in the water he has a habit of collaring me and giving me a lecture on christian morality and this is something I can do without - particularly first thing in the morning when I'm trying to neutralise any thought. I took a number of photos of this rock and one that particularly appealed was taken on a very sombre windless day with the close tones of blue grey suggesting an airless, stilted quality.
 I've always found it problematic deciding when a picture is finished and this one is no exception, even as I write this months after I've last worked on it I still can't decide whether it's complete. A lot of detail, especially to do with the rock, has been left out but I sense that increasing the amount of information is not going to benefit this piece and lacking any other ideas in which direction to take it, even though I'm somewhat dissatisfied, leaving it as is seems best.

Heart stone on a plinth
 This is the first of some smaller pictures that could be called studies and on this scale every dot starts to count. I passed this slime covered stone daily and once the idea that it vaguely resembled a heart took hold I couldn't stop evaluating it for a picture.
 The atmosphere of this scene with the sun on the surf, sea haze and the romanticism of a lighthouse on a distant cape presented a problem because these things are seductive and a distraction from the thing that really interested me about this scene, namely the architecture of an ordinary boulder resting on a base of rocks akin to a plinth.
 Some of the atmosphere, notably the light quality is evident but the canvas size is too restrictive, unless a very fine brush is used, to convincingly describe in enough detail what I wanted to say about what one person commented 'just looked like a green blob'.

Desaturated landscape
 The structure featured in this picture is a toilet block, a feature that landscape artists would usually regard as unworthy subject matter to be edited out of the frame. I liked the perversity of bringing it centre stage and editing out a rather picturesque pine that threatened to make this image a bit too nice (I did leave in the pines's shadow because compositionally it works better and secondly to confound visual continuity for those who notice these things).
 Like ANZAC monuments every township has a dunny block, sometimes prominently located in the median strip of the main street. This one is located in the desolate camping ground / caravan park of Lang Lang Jetty and was photographed on a grey and brutally windy day and has a mood I found irresistible not as a vacation spot but as a theme for art.
 The bits of border cutting into the image function much like the bands or veils of stipple in some of the previous pictures in that it's a strategy to see how the image survives being broken down. For much the same reason I kept piling on the stipple randomly on the foreground long after it was necessary and smothering detail which I'd struggled over.
 Whilst working on this painting I managed to find expensive pigments such as viridian and cobalt generously discounted. The picture is painted in a gloomy desaturated key but close up the expanded palette is revealed in tiny flashes of colour.

Lang Lang Caravan
  Apologies to the people of Lang Lang but Lang Lang jetty (where this picture is set) must qualify for the arsehole of coastal Victoria. Having said that I must admit that it has a pretty unique character that I'm a big fan of and if such a thing exists I would describe it as the perfect existential landscape. The crappiness of this tin box bolted to a caravan defies belief but the brutal simplicity of the forms is irresistible for a painting. To the left is a water tank with the inevitable Mirror Bush and on the right the straw coloured dots represent paddocks that hem in the camping ground on the landward side.
  Like Desaturated landscape this picture is almost monochrome with colour reserved just for the central strip and little triangle of sand. I was going to make a big deal out of the rock wall with lots of subtle gradations of black and grey but I found that the rudimentary blocking in using two colours has a simplicity that is better not to fool with.

Coffee at Tooradin Aerodrome
For what was once a dedicated tea drinking nation Australia is now the land of the latte. After a hard day exploring the wilds of Lang Lang a strong coffee is required and a stop at Tooradin airfield to check out a beached trawler settled amongst the mangroves revealed a restaurant I hadn't noticed previously.
  I did a double take when I clapped eyes on this place. A bunker like tilt slab extension was being built with a statue of an eagle that Hitler would have approved of or that would be right at home in front of an FBI building. Even though it was a Sunday and the place was full nobody had bothered to remove the bits of wood and other detritus of a building site that littered the entrance to the cafe. The whole tableau was delightfully unfathomable although I suspect the eagle is meant to represent the Bunourong people - the original inhabitants of this part of the world.
  As for the Amanti banner compositionally the black rectangle was just right but I was more intrigued by the idea of product placement in the fine arts. I might just email the Amanti people to offer them this fine picture but I suspect they might be nonplussed at the idea of someone painting this less than salubrious scene.
  The picture was prepared with a field of white dots on the natural colour of the canvas and the density of the subsequent layers can be easily gauged by the visibility of these dots on various parts of the surface. This painting optically is the richest of this series and offers another avenue for future exploration.