Saturday 23 March 2013

Lamington on Doily

                                          Acrylic on board  6" x 6"

I very nearly ate the main attraction in this still-life before I could paint it. I confess I did eat just a sliver after cutting it in half. For a while I thought I'd discovered a fail-safe tool to enable me to loosen up my style and paint quickly. I was itching to eat it, but even with that motivation I still couldn't manage the elusive speed and looseness I was after. I began the painting on Tuesday, got back to it on Thursday and finished it on Saturday. Of course by the end, eating it was the last thing I wanted to do (it had dried up and practically  grown legs!).

For those that don't know, lamingtons are an Australian cake and were popular for fundraising in the form of "lamington drives" for schools and other organisations. I have special memories of Mum making batches of them when I was a child and of me helping to coat them in coconut. This specimen was bought from the local bakery - I'm not much of a baker I'm afraid.

Just as an aside - after whining so much about never seeing Twenty Eight Parrots anymore, this morning I was excited to hear their distinctive trill. I grabbed my camera (the one I still haven't learnt to use) and managed to catch a very poor snap of two in the tree out the front. Can you spot them?




Sunday 17 March 2013

A Year of Progress

                                            Acrylic on board 6" x 6" (the one on the left)

Today I painted the same subject matter as I painted about a year ago. I was interested to see what progress I may have made over the duration. I don't know that today's painting (on the left) was any easier than it was the first time around, but the outcome was certainly far better. Although, I think today's lemon could have been more subtly rendered. I had spent more than an hour drawing in the outline yesterday and then decided to spend a few hours on my writing instead of beginning to paint. Hence, today I had a slightly shriveled lemon to work from and I was trying to compensate by plumping it up a bit. I'm excited to find that I am actually making some progress with my weekly painting habit.

Thursday 7 March 2013

Sugar Bowl with Tongs

                                                  Acrylic on board  6" x 6"
I find that I really enjoy the challenge of painting china and shiny things. I painted this over the course of three days and spent about seven hours on it. If I ever hope to offer my work for sale, I need to learn to loosen things up a bit.

Tuesday 5 March 2013

Rainbow Lorikeet


I have managed to photograph one of the Rainbow Lorikeets that frequent the area. They are such beautiful birds but I confess to not being able to properly enjoy their beauty. I still haven't quite forgiven them for bullying out our lovely native Twenty Eight Parrot which we almost never see in our garden anymore. They should be a good lesson to me to accept the things I cannot change.  I will make that my goal today!

Now I must get on with the painting that I began working on yesterday.  This post is just another strategy to delay getting on with it. I often have to push through the barrier of inertia each time I begin painting.  It only takes moments before I am in the creative flow so I don't know why I carry on like this. It doesn't happen all the time, but I seem to be going through a patch of it lately.