Loading Zone
  This picture was previously called The Black Car and this is what I wrote about it at the time:  

  "The black vehicle at the end of a row of parking spaces is a rather insignificant visual element in a picture that threatens never to transcend the banal imagery that it's based on. I suppose it could be described as an act of hubris to imagine that such bland subject matter could be transformed into something interesting but it's worthwhile remembering that the subject does not always have to be interesting although the finished painting should definitely be so."
   "The reason for choosing this topic is that shops are a central feature of modern life yet they rarely feature in contemporary landscape or cityscape paintings unless there is a high degree of stylised romanticism of the sort you used to find in cliched Parisian street scenes. I had a lot of difficulty with this picture and a close inspection of the detail in the shops reveal dots painted five or six layers deep in some areas. I've got a resistance to overworking paintings and I felt on several occasions I should cut my losses and abandon this one. However, struggling until it's either an unrecoverable mess or a success is an invaluable education that you don't get by giving up to soon. I suppose this picture is OK but I'm still nagged by it."

  That nagging feeling persisted. Clearly the sparse composition was the main problem and populating the picture with more objects presented one solution. Because these landscapes haven't taken any liberties with reality these introduced objects should be congruent with what would be found in a street situation. Scale and perspective should ideally be reasonably consistent as well.
  I returned to the original site and re-photographed the scene - this time with parked vehicles. The silver car was chopped out of this photo and pasted into a photo of the painting. Once the car had been added the painting was photographed again and this time a photo of the wheelie bin was inserted - a process that could be described as collage with the aid of Photoshop.
  I feel more comfortable with the picture now despite loosing a certain 'cleaness' but it will take a while before I can commit to deciding how successful it is. Discovering the usefulness of the Photoshop/painting strategy as an addition to the artistic repertoire has made the exercise worthwhile however.

Monument
  This small picture has also had a troubled history. Previous visitors to this web site may remember it in a different incarnation. Neither photos do either versions justice (the painted work has proven diabolically difficult to photograph and compress for the web) but the final version has a ghostliness appropriate to the subject matter - an ANZAC monument. For visitors unfamiliar with Australian culture these iconic monuments to the war dead can be seen in the smallest town and the largest city. This one happens to be situated in a lovely clifftop spot in the pretty coastal township of Flinders and I initially photographed it because of a para glider hovering in the background.
  The newly reworked version has had the least satisfactory element, the background, drastically overpainted so that only a faint residue of the original remains. I guess that such a strategy questions the purpose of these images; should they be fairly realistic renderings or can they drift off into abstraction? I like the latter notion but that is something that must be gradually worked towards.

Banksias
  The first Europeans who saw this part of the world (Mornington Peninsula) commented upon the loveliness of the open woodland aspects and then set about cutting these trees down to fire the lime kilns. These banksias are remnant vegetation that line parts of the foreshore of Port Phillip bay and the sinuous lines of the trunks are aesthetically irresistible.
  This painting caused me a lot of headaches. I was quite convinced during the early stages that this one was going to be a pushover and that parts of the picture could be left fairly raw and unfinished but the opposite occurred - it was reworked endlessly. The reason why I was so dissatisfied was unclear and consequently the reworking consisted of lots of minor changes and elaborations that didn't substantially alter the work. When I decided to quit fiddling with it I was still unhappy but any further additions seemed increasingly futile but sometimes fierce concentration can cloud your judgment and now after a period of distance the painting is starting to look better.

Park
  This statue is Mathew Flinders who explored the Australian coastline in the early 1800's but visitors to this park on the Mornington foreshore barely give it a glance. This is with some justification because I think it's a pretty crummy piece of sculpture but for me it provided a nice foil to what is the real raison d'etre of this picture - the lovely cypress that spans the top half of the picture frame.
  The photo that forms the basis of the painting was severely backlit and that was precisely what I found appealing. However the silhouette was too harsh and required some some gentle tonality and colour plus the brickwork surrounding the plinth needed to be a bit richer. The composition needed cropping to focus on the relevant bits, eliminate extraneous detail and give the tree a greater presence. As a consequence the image has become a bit dreamier.

Picnic Table
  This is a common bit of beachside architecture with the BBQ area, taps and toilets usually in close proximity. It was photographed with a basic zoom free digital camera of a type that has the lens set at a rather wide angle and it shows in the distorted perspective of the table. It was this foreshortening and the nice shape of the shadow that drew me to this image.
  Because of the care required to draw this ensemble correctly meant that the painting started out with a distinctly crisp hard edged look. I didn't like it at first because I was working simultaneously on the Banksias and Park paintings that have a gentler painterly quality that my eyes had become accustomed to. It has that graphic Japanese woodcut look re-enforced by the the mirroring of the foliage shapes on both sides of the picture.

Median Strip
  Country towns in Australia often have a generously proportioned central dividing strip along the main street. This strip usually has a public toilet, a bandstand, statue or memorial. In this case the statue depicts the guy who introduced irrigation to semi-arid Mildura. The figure has taken off his hat (presumably after a hard day giving orders) and directs his gaze inland to reflect on ... whatever.
  To my delight when I sketched in the figure it resembled more a guy at a barbecue with a tinny in one hand and a smoke in the other. A bit more apropos I thought but unfortunately the gesture didn't survive the dot technique terribly well. The gravitas of pioneer mythology proposed by these monuments has a tendency to be undermined by poor civic planning and the urban crud of traffic lights, water towers, shitty architecture and car yards. I got a bit of a chuckle out of turning the car yard into a bit of a Grecian temple - appropriate given the Australian love of the motor car.
  This picture has a distinctly poppier flavour compared to the more austere and sombre landscapes that have preceded it, the colour is higher key and the urban theme is treated with some insouciance. The composition is not as hierarchical - the centre of the picture is a relative void with the dominant objects (and brightest colour) concentrated on the margins. The treatment of the stone blob disconcerted me initially but now that I've grown used to it I'm amused by the dumbed down quality.
  This picture was subsequently heavily reworked through a process of erasure by brushing paint through a mylar stencil punched with holes. This technique literally led to a 'whiting out' of detail but resulted in a physically more satisfying object at the expense of narrative coherence. Obliterating all detail in the left third of the picture plane reduced the compostion to a weak series of mid ground horizontal and vertical elements. Introducing oblique slashes of stencilled dots fixed that problem and introduced a curious spotlighting effect giving the guy on the plinth a vaguely holy appearance.
[View the original Median Strip here]

Building Site
  The higher key colour values in this picture are a consequence of experimenting with a different procedure for the underpainting. The source photograph which was deliberately chosen for its saturated colour was printed out as a colour separation and used as a guide for building up a sequence of layers painted in this order: yellow, red, blue and black. The result was predictably rather crude because there was no blending of colours through transparency as would occur in four colour commercial printing. The next step was a process of refinement by inserting these 'missing' colours and tones but only in a central panel subtly contrasting with the surrounding rough zones.
  Was the exercise worth the trouble? Not really, although the high key palette combined with the luxury house / palm tree imagery give the painting a kind of cheesy holiday resort flavour that I find amusing but ultimately this is a one off.

Foreshore
  The front yards of these properties almost reach the tide line. One keen gardener has topiarised numerous small shrubs to form a somewhat kitschy but nonetheless striking 'theme' garden. The resolution of the dot technique proved inadequate to capture the texture of this landscape and I decided to simplify it to basic elements - tide line, pines, shrubbery, houses and sky. The painting was on a stretcher and I transferred it to panel in order to crop the composition and concentrate the the main design elements within an almost square format - the first of this series that ventures away from the standard 3 x 4 ratio.

Hazy Afternoon
  The full title Guy walking along the beach on a hazy afternoon, thinking refers to an activity that I enjoy but as pretentious as it might sound I'm tiring of the minimalist descriptions I usually resort to and the thought of a big title for a little painting was amusing. This tiny picture (20 x 15 cm) was made for a group show sponsored by the Shire Council that stipulated the theme of the local environment and a maximum size of A5.
  Initially I found the size daunting but nonetheless quickly grasped the benefits of being able to work speedily through an idea, in other words a sketch or study. This is an intelligent practice but one that I've avoided for whatever inexplicable reasons. The time investment in the larger works isn't trivial and anything that helps prevent failure or umpteen revisions needs to be given consideration.
  The brush I used is marginally smaller than the size I use for the larger pictures so the surface is coarsely granular and despite the tiny format the viewer still needs to take a few steps back for the image to resolve itself (or in your case lean back from your monitor a bit).

Languid Day
  The photo used for this picture was taken the same time as Hazy Afternoon (above). If you were to turn 180 degrees from the headland featured in that painting you would see the vista of Languid Day. That particular day was balmy, hazy and windless - quite the opposite from the usual crisp breeze and relatively clear sky typical of spring in this part of the world.
  The almost European weather and the treatment of the paint give the picture an Impressionistic quality that I like but nevertheless wonder about the validity of working in a style whose heyday was 120 years ago. That the picture starts to verge on abstraction partially rescues it from being twee. However, the tiny size (20 x 15 cm) means that this work could be considered more of an exercise than a properly resolved painting.