Red Mangrove (122 x 122 cm)

In the landscape I have a sense when a subject or subjects suitable for painting are nearby. It depends, of course, on what series or type of subjects I am working on at the time. Take Red Mangrove as an example. Recently I have been interested in mangroves as subjects. The shapes are fascinating and create wonderful grids in the design format of a painting. Their rhythmical directions, structures, textures and colours, are all part of that attraction, as are the shadows cast on their branches and trunks, and in the water. Contrasts of sky and sea backgrounds and sandy or muddy foregrounds, with just a shallow coverage of the tide, the surface throwing reflections back onto the trunks … The Red mangrove species is common to the Great Sandy Strait. Its leaves are a bright green and as they die, take on the many hues of yellow. Trunks vary from a deep reddish brown to shades of grey, and are often encrusted with oyster shells and other forms of marine life. There is so much more to say about them. They are to me exceptionally aesthetic.

For Red Mangrove a square format was chosen. In the immediate foreground the subject needed to be life-size, so I decided to make the canvas 122 x 122 cm in size. The first layers of paint begin at the top, with the sea background, a light blue with some darker movement … Prussian blue with body white (zinc white) and the top forms of the trunk and roots are beginning to stand out. The subject is a grid, i.e. its forms are covering the canvas, running out of the sides and top, but with a strong design concept breaking up the space, with positive (subject) and negative (background) shapes balancing each other. The main trunk mass is on the vertical cut (golden mean 1.618 value) to the left side, and other forms are rearing out at the cuts on both sides, some at the top and others below. There is one small seedling growing from the base, just on the right hand vertical cut. A nice touch. It has some small green leaves contrasting against the darks further up. The water line where most of the prop roots are, is on the lower horizontal golden mean.

Prussian blue is used in all the mixes for the darks and lights – with alizarin, burnt and raw umber, cadmium yellow deep and yellow ochre – helping to unify the colour relationships. Blue is complementary to both the deep and light reds. Greens are also complementary.

I am now beginning to push the brush in the direction of the many ellipses running around trunks and branches. The mangrove has a natural propensity to show growth rings around its trunks, which allows the raised drawn movement in paint to look natural. The forms, with their wonderful texture – bumps, small lumps, pits, scars, and the very prominent remains of oyster shells – are beginning to show their objective structure and, hopefully, subjective essence, and I am now so very much a part of this painting. The water at the base of the oblique picture plain is full of movement, the slightly zig-zag diagonals of blues, greens, reflected browns and yellows are moving down towards the bottom edge of the canvas. Sand from the bank is becoming visible through the water surface … or is it? It’s ambiguous.

After almost one month of work, at least eight hours per day, the painting is finished. And I am pleased. I frame it with a very thin shadow-box profile of hoop pine coloured a pinkish off-white to relate to the lights in the painting. Looks good.

Red Mangroves II (51 x 135 cm)

This painting follows on in the tradition of its big brother Red Mangrove, but is a subject in its own right. Its colour palette is similar, but the spatial tension is a little stronger. The shape is vertical to the proportion of one whirling square rectangle, plus one square; the sum total of 51.5 x 135 cm, designed to encompass the subject, which is basically root tubers, beginning at the top right golden mean and moving diagonally down to the bottom left. Simple shapes but so much rhythm, with its beautiful contrast of directions from forms behind. Some leaves appear in the top left, and another adeptly placed seedling is coming up from the bottom right cut. Drawn movement in paint again shows the structure of ellipses, especially the front forms which are lighter pinks, contrasting with the darker reds and blues of the background. I frame it much the same as Red Mangrove but tint it a darker pink to relate to the mid pinks in the painting.

Deep Creek (50 x 158 cm)

Another in the series of cliff subjects, this one taken from near the Deep Creek estuary on the western side of Fraser Island: another ancient dune system, with beautiful red-pink oxides colouring the sandstone cliff face, gradually subsiding into the sea. It is a simple subject, yet not so simple, the red and salmon pink cliffs reflecting into blue-green water … the shapes are fascinating; just love the colour complementaries, juxtaposing with the rhythmic movements of water, the blue from the sky joining in with their play.

A light coloured araucaria pine, minimal shadowbox frame presents the subject well.

Cliff II (50 x 158 cm)

Continuing on down the Sandy Strait, in the same area as Cliff I, this subject is a little more complex. Deep reds, sumptuous red-darks, comprising burnt umber, permanent mauve, alizarin, cadmium yellow deep, and white, to give, among other things, a variety of pinks …

The same attention to drawn movement is applied, and for the same reasons, but the design is obviously different. The green of the sea is complimentary to the reds, and balances its area with the white band, or mass, across the top of the format. Moving up the canvas from the sea, which is an oblique plain, to the rock ledge, then sloping inwards up to the cliff base, a vertical plain to the top, with the exception of concave shapes on the way up … I like the large concave form on the right, coveting the ‘fall-out’ area. It strengthens the notional space, moving obliquely into the cliff face.

Cliff I (50 x 158 cm)

The first in a series of cliff subjects, as viewed from the sea, near Deep Creek at Ungowa, on the western side of Fraser Island. Cliff I, being sandstone, is a remnant of a very old dune system, exposed by the sea … oxides having leached down from the surface over thousands of years, forming the colours seen today.

I love the red of this cliff face, bright golds and siennas, but it is the composition that is also alluring, with its rhythmical verticals and horizontals throughout. It’s like a slice of cake, the vertical vein running from top to bottom, and the zig-zag of dark coming from the golden section to the bottom left. We are looking straight at a vertical cliff face, but, in design terms, it is a flat format from top to bottom.

The paint texture is both visual and actual within an accentuated drawn movement (brush marks), showing the directions of both plain and facet, which emphasises surface objectivity. I hope that by showing the structure in this way, as in all my paintings, I can induce a subjective response in the viewer, and get that aesthetic message across.

A thin profile shadow-box frame in natural (brown) pencil cedar, finished the subject well, relating to the reds in the cliff.

Boomanjin VI (triptych, 102 x 102 cm)

(Each panel 30 x 102 cm. Centre Panel displayed 6 cm apart on each side.)

This is a subject from Lake Boomanjin on Fraser Island – another one of those subjects you see when looking for something else. I just happened to look down in front of me, and there it was – or to be specific, the idea was. Pieces of dead reeds washed up as flotsam on the sandy edge of the lake, displaying a natural but aesthetic order, juxtaposing their directions with the surface of the environment, forming a play between positive and negative shapes … Fascinating! Later on, in the studio, I decided to divide the subject into three panels of the same size, making it a triptych. One large panel on its own (102 x 102 cm) would have been uninteresting, but three small panels (30 x 102 cm) displayed separately, with a continuous design relating throughout, seemed to work very well.

A lot more effort though involved – three stretcher frames and canvases, and three minimal picture frames – but when hung, about 6 cm apart from the centre panel, the design was far more appealing. The spectrum is conservative: ultramarine and raw umber, variously combined with body white (zinc) to produce many light and dark greys, and a yellow ochre and white combination create other necessary lights. The more dominant titanium white, being the overall highlighter.

How to make sand look like sand? A difficult question. However, by experimenting with many different brushes, with stubbier bristles, and by flicking or splattering at the canvas paint of different consistencies and colours – blue, grey, brown, white and yellow – gradually with practice, a good quality of surface was built up that had the appearance of sand. I have used this method with all sand areas in my paintings, except in more distant perspectives.

Shallows II (103 x 103 cm)

This subject comes from the same area as Shallows, but has an interesting history. Originally it was part of a mangrove subject taken from the eastern side of Little Woody, in which the rocks, which are the dominant feature of the subject now, were only a background for the trees. Feeling that the subject was too busy, I removed the mangroves and emphasised the rocks, and this in turn improved the overall composition.

The depth of the bottom left area of the subject was accentuated and the design has many directions and rhythms throughout. The water travels up obliquely towards a horizontal level near the top, where the band of rocks running across appears to rise vertically as their colours change. There is an emphasis on reflected light and some distortion promoting depth, and I love the turquoise hue all over. It is framed with a light pinkish off-white, which picks out the minimal pinks in the painting.