40cm x 40cm acrylic on canvas, contemporary Tasmanian Oak frame
The colour, shapes and the sea all combine to create characters and a story usually unfolds while I’m organising the elements and getting composition and balance right. Effectively a painting usually decides what it wants to be and there’s no getting away from it. Our Bichon Frise, Dudley has retired from the sailing life, but still enjoys a walk on the local doggie beach. It was only a matter of time before he appeared in one of the scenes.
Most of the characters evolve or reveal themselves from collections of geometric grids of geometric shapes. In much the same way as our brains want to see faces in nature, in rock formations, headlands become animals etc, that’s exactly what happens during my painting stages.