Over the years I've attended many life-drawing classes, but one of the biggest problems was the lack of long poses. Many artists wouldn't know what to do when a session resumed after the 20 minute break, so 20 minutes or shorter became almost standard lengths of time to draw a human being! Not always, but too much of the time this was the case. Consequently, these two small life paintings were done in a sculpture class, and over 5 afternoons with the same pose. There are now many Academies all over the world that embrace the study of the human figure over a sustained period of time. The quick sketch is a good thing to do but again, it's often mistakenly seen as capturing the essence of a figure and no more need be done to the drawing. But essence is the life of a drawing, not just the suggestion of a figure. If you wrote a story in short-hand it doesn't automatically mean you've captured the essence of anything. A great novelist captures the essences of the characters portrayed in the book because the author brings them to life. For me, the same applies to drawing and painting. Of course spending a long time on a pose doesn't mean you've caught the essence of the figure before you, because bad paintings can take just as long to do as excellent ones, but it's good to be able to draw or paint the figure over a long period of time as a challenge and to arrive at something more 'there'.
The paintings and drawings below were done over various periods of time. The first and second took 20 x 20 minute poses to paint. The third, fourth and fifth were done over 4 x 20 minutes of posing and the final drawings were 10 minutes. Various mediums and time periods bring different results of course, but it's good to practise them all
In 1993, I painted a quick sketch of an early morning sunrise of a Paris street scene. The most magical thing about that morning was the red sun shining through a clearing mist. I've always wanted to do another, more thoughtful painting, of this idea.
Caspar David Friedrich is an artist I admire. The work of his pictured here, and the idea of something appearing through a mist contrasted with a detailed foreground, was also something I wanted to paint one day.
Sometimes when a see a tree, I get a feeling that it's watching me. It's such an uncanny feeling, but it doesn't happen with every tree. As I was driving along one day, I noticed the tree pictured here, and thought it would make a great painting. I returned to paint it as a silhouette against the sun, but something was holding me back. It was when I got back to the studio and thought about the progress of the picture that I thought it would be better to paint it as a tree in a mist with a red rising sun. At last all the ingredients presented themselves and 30 years later I finally painted a picture that had been at the back of my mind for decades.
This painting of Selena is the second time I've painted a family member of my nephew and niece-in-law, Robbie and Sara Jones. It was a pleasure to paint her, even though it was based on a photograph. The problem with the photograph was that it distorted her face slightly, as if her picture was stuck around a ball. So I amended the image so that it felt right.
I thought I would add the other portrait, painted of her older brother, Lorenzo, just to keep the family together.
- Monday 3rd November 2025
ABC's Andrew McGarry spoke with me about horse racing and my painting of Makybe Diva.
'Like a spaceship landed at the MCG': The artist's view.
It wasn't just the racing world or the general public that was taken by the Diva's third Cup win.
Shane Jones is a Ballarat/Melbourne based artist - but he has had a love of horses all his life. He remembers walking with his brother as a young child up tp the stables of Hall pf Fame trainer Jim Moloney, where he later became an apprentice jockey.
'Visually, racing is stunning, because you've got everything - you've got the human figure, the horse form, the colours, you've got the landscape, all genres in one', Jones says.
It was a privilege to be at Ballarat's Palace Regent cinema last night to hear Bryan Brown in conversation with Renee Price, representing Collins Booksellers. The main reason the event was on was to launch Bryan's latest novel titled The Hidden and to sell his other books, The Drowning and Jimmy Sweet.
But he talked about is early years, his upbringing by his mother and how he got into acting in the first place, acting in the theatre and in film. Acting is all about story telling and all these experiences fuelled his desire to eventually write his own books and invent his own stories. Even though he told us he was 78 years old, writing is a relatively new direction in his life.
It was such a pleasure to have a brief chat with Bryan as he signed our two books, The Hidden and Jimmy Sweet. I'm looking forward to reading all of them. Deborah had already bought The Drowning which explains the two books purchased.
Bryan is such an engaging speaker, and I'm sure the entire audience, which was in the hundreds, would have stayed all night to listen to him tell us about his experiences and the people he has met. But he spoke with an energy that bought his words to life and engaged the attention of the audience.
I've always responded to paintings that have a sense of privacy, intimacy or secrecy. This painting is mainly about the light from the lamp, but because it's a bedroom setting (the white sheets of the bed are barely visible at the bottom left) it might suggest an atmosphere of privacy and intimacy. Hopefully there is a sense that such a fragment of a room can suggest an entire room in one's mind.
Perhaps you could say there is a Japanese formality about the composition with its geometrical structure. I've always liked that aspect of Japanese design.
The Tao Te Ching (Way of Life), by Lao Tzu, is a book of short stanzas touching on the nature of God.
The lines in some of the paragraphs have resonance for me because it's these qualities that should exist in art, qualities that transcend subject matter. Every painting and drawing I do I try to capture even a little of what Lao Tzu described. Here are 2 examples.
Stanza 4, paragraph 1 -
The way is void
Used but never filled
An Abyss it is,
Like an ancestor
From which all things come
Stanza 14, paragraph 2 -
...
It stretches far back
To that nameless estate
Which existed before the creation
