Self Portrait With Plants

Self Portrait with Plants, 2026, oil on canvas, 61.25 x 41 cm

Ballarat has its annual Heritage Festival in late May. Megan Finlayson and Bryan Putt get a group of us together to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday in Victorian fancy dress and during the festival we promenade around the streets of Ballarat. Our promenading group is always a big hit and we get a lot of photographers honing in. We are not an official part of the Heritage program and we are not even royalists but it is a fun occasion. I've only participated twice and the first time was with great reluctance but it led to me liking my cap so much that I wear it all the time. I do many self portraits and my liking for my cap was a good opportunity to do another one with the cap being a feature.

Debora Klein and I as Victorian-era citizens

In the Ballarat train station cafe after our promenading. 

From left - Megan Finlayson as Queen Victoria, Deborah Klein, Gary Hickson,

 Christine Hickson, Myself and Bryan Putt as a Victorian Railways employer. 

 

Waller House

It's always so interesting to visit a house once occupied by artists. Waller House in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe is such a place. It's now in the hands of the National Trust which is a good thing to know because it's always difficult to preserve artists' residencies/studios so having Waller House in the hands of the National Trust is the closest one can get to having something important preserved.

Waller House is where Napier and Christian Waller spent a great deal of their life together. Their murals, mosaics and stained-glass artwork can be found in prominent buildings in Victoria, especially in Melbourne like the Melbourne Town Hall and the State Library of Victoria. 

For information about visiting Waller House click National Trust  

Napier Waller has mosaics on the facades of a number of buildings around Melbourne CBD, it's like an outdoor gallery. Sometimes it's difficult to notice them because the height of the trees can partially obscure the view. He was also a wonderful printmaker and draughtsman

As well as a muralist, Christian Waller was also a wonderful illustrator, and printmaker. She was in high demand and her stained-glass work can be found in over 20 churches in Victoria and New South Wales.

Here are some pics of their house and studio, so much of it like it was when the were living there.

The driveway to the welcoming sign

 

The main room to the house

Waller's self portrait drawing

Workroom where the glass was cut 

Napier Waller's drawing sitting by a table

Christian Waller's design for a stained-glass work

Tools and odds and ends

Another studio used by Napier for large scale mural work

A view from this studio

Christian's niece, Klytie Pate, came to live with the Wallers when Klytie's father died. She assisted around the studio but she eventually became a prominent ceramicist. 

A painting done by Napier on the wall of Klytie's bedroom.

The gardens were a beautiful addition to the house and studio. 

Volunteers now tend to tend to them with great pride.

Man at the Window

Man at the Window, 2026, oil on canvas, 61.25 x 25.25 cm

While I was painting a view of a hotel across the road from my apartment I had the idea of painting a fragment from that painting. The larger painting was composed of many windows so I decided on a  composition which honed at a window. I thought a tall canvas size would reflect the high-rise architecture of the building. The blue sign was extremely exaggerated as this was the image that formed in my mind. Perhaps it gives the image a slightly other-worldly atmosphere.  

 

Four Portraits of Bill

 

Bill, 1995, oil on canvas, 91 x 76 cm

Bill, 1996, oil on canvas, 61 x 50.5 cm

Bill Reid and I went to kindreds of life-drawing classes over the years and on occasions we used each other as models. It's difficult to be able to paint a human being from life these days unless you do a self-portrait, have a friend sit for you or receive a portrait commission. The problem is the amount of time needed to do a portrait. Painting a person from life is a great thing to achieve but for this to be possible you do need multiple sittings. Painting people from photographs seems to be the norm in many instances in our contemporary world but it often doesn't produce the type of image I admire. I've often thought if Rembrandt was painting today would he have painted from photographs? Perhaps he might have done but would his portraits have the same feel ? Perhaps not.

The Painter's Eye

 

Moonlight and Rain, 2021, oil on linen, 40.5 x 20.5 cm

This painting is in an exhibition at Nicholas Thompson Gallery titled The Painter's Eye. There are 14 artists and one of them is Kez Hughes who curated the show. It's good to be in an exhibition where painting is held in high regard. The almost obsession with machine made imagery in the art world is disappointing to say the least, so it's a relief in a way when the art of painting is allowed to balance that which is made by humans against that which is made by technology.

Hugh Magnus wrote an excellent essay to accompany the exhibition. His last paragraph says a lot and to quote him here - 

'These paintings share many things, but most of all it is their makers' utmost respect for the traditions and techniques of their craft that endows them with such lightness and beauty. Through bringing these works together, the monolith of an imagined, capital-P 'Painting' begins to crumble. Working in different styles, varying modes and motifs, the artists of The Painter's Eye apply their tools and logic to create lasting icons, persistent images whose power stretches well beyond the edges of their supports'.

The artists in this exhibition are - Xiao You Bai, Sis Cowie, Sarah Crowest, Alex Dillon, David Egan, Storm Gold, Kez Hughes, Natasha Col, Shane Jones, Madeleine Peters, Steven Rendall, Rachael Robb, Kristina Tsoulis-Reay and Kate Wallace.

The Wind Stirs the Water

 

The Wind Stirs the Water, 2025, oil on linen, 55.5 X 45.25 cm

This painting was inspired by a windy day. Water is such a beautiful medium that reflects the various colours sunlight sweeps across its surface, but the wind can disrupt this and affect the surface in a different way. I like the choppy and dark water stirred by the wind. Since wind is invisible, it's this movement that allows the eye to 'see' it in its various moods. 

From the Life Class

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 

oil on canvas

oil on linen

oil on paper

                                                                    dry pastel on paper

pencil on paper

ink on papere

ink on paper