The Surreal

Recently I was arranging my paintings in storage when I came across some paintings that are unusual. Unusual because I have no idea what they mean. There are a few more works like these and they seem to exist from an impulse to paint an image that is suggested by one's imagination even though its meaning is not clear, so they could be called surrealist pictures. All these years later I'm still not able to even guess as to what they might mean. 

Untitled #120, 2003, oil on canvas, 152 x 65.75 cm

Untitled #16, 1997, oil on canvas, 91 x 77 cm

Untitled #96, 2002, oil on canvas, 91 x 61 cm.

More Drawings

The drawings below were done 3 decades ago and they were a different approach to how I was drawing previously. They were drawn with white conte and white dry pastel. The strongest lines were applied with the conte while the softer tones were added by rubbing a soft pastel onto a paper towel and then rubbing that where needed.

All the drawings were done from life. It's a quick way to do a drawing which can be useful in a life class as the poses at that time were rarely sustained. The top one was a longer than usual pose but the other two life drawings would have been either a 20 minute or a 40 minute pose. I can't remember how long the still life bust drawing took but in a way it's irrelevant as time wasn't an issue.

Mist After the Rain

The idea for this painting occurred while driving around Lake Wendouree. It was an amazing sight with a mist almost erasing the view and yet, here and there, certain features appeared as if drawn with lines. 

There are many sights that offer good ideas for paintings, but they last for only a few minutes. This means that I have to paint the picture from a general memory of what I saw. This painting is an example of how it came about - edited memories.

Mist After the Rain, 2022, oil on canvas, 30.75 x 41 cm

Short Poses from Life Classes

These drawings were done about 30 years ago. So many poses in life classes are too short, as if there becomes a problem when the model takes a break and resumes the pose. While quick poses are good, sustained poses are more important because the complexities and subtleties of the human form can be explored even more. 

I can't remember which of these drawings was a 10 minute or 20 minute pose. The black and white ones are drawn with ink and the last two are oil paint wash.

David Hockney's line drawings and Degas' essence drawings (oil paint thinned with turps) were always an inspiration.

 

Drawing from Life

In my early 20s, when I started out to be an artist, drawing from art books was fine for a while but it couldn't be limited to this practice since you need to explore other avenues of making images in order to find your own voice. With this in mind, I began going to life classes and asking friends to sit for a portrait drawing. The face was important as I wanted to create a person and not just a 'model', as if he or she was just an object to draw. There is not much background in most of the drawings as time was extremely limited and my aim was to capture the figure. 

These are some of the drawings I did from life. The life drawings were done from 4 x 20 minute poses and the portraits perhaps 2 hours each. The aim was to develop a fairly accurate observation from life and explore different mediums and papers, such as pencil, pastel, conte and oil paint wash.