Acrylic and mixed media on wooden panel, framed 40cm sq
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
BEAUTIFUL SERIES
Series of five, painted on board Island Girl, featuring land and sea, coastal and sailing influences.
The goal of this series was simply to capture the colour blue. At the heart of each painting is an abstracted landscape, along the way each painting evolved to tell the story of man’s relationship with water and nature.
After many months visiting uninhabited islands, creeks and beaches in North Queensland, nature starts to get wild, untamed and out of this world and you begin to feel very small. Also the brain wants to break it down and begins to try to organise it. As we know from science, everything in nature is designed and formed by mathematics and nature organises itself in pure geometric forms.
Repetition of shape and form can be seen in everything from the way the tide recede on the beach; geological strata in rocks, repetitive tangles of jungle habitat, or the roots of mangroves.
On Curlew Island, two sailing days east of Mackay the tides are amongst the highest variation on the Eastern Coast (of Australia), sand bars revealed tidal pools with regulated patterns of triangles.
These and other forms and lines began to emerge in the paintings.
I played with thick opaque whites in the under layers and then broke up the areas into geometric forms. Transparent glazes of blues and yellows were layered to capture the drama and separation of land and sea seen from the perspective of a tiny boat looking back to land. These areas of highly glazed colour feel almost “poured” into jug-like vessels such as tea pots or vases. By presenting nature is geometric planes and grids then posed questions about man’s ongoing futile attempts to tame and control nature. I added very simple child-like shapes and colours to suggest how small we humans are within the greater scheme of nature.
The working title and inspiration for this series was “Beautiful” from the song Space Walk by Lemon Jelly. The spoken lyrics are overlaid on a rich repetitive 1990s rythmic track by astronauts who can only say the words (it’s) Beautiful when seeing earth from space for the first time.