Rodney is a Champion!

Rodney with "Outback Worker" at Wallabadah Art Show

Last night Rodney and I attended the opening of the Wallabadah Art Show. Wallabadah is a delightful bush town, also on the New England Highway, about 50km north of Murrurundi. They had their 4th art and jazz festival last night and Rodney and I entered 2 works each into the art show. Last year I won the champion prize and this year Rodney won with his fabulous work "Outback Worker"

The portrait is of well known Murrurundi resident Shane Brown. Shane expertly and adeptly removed half a dozen dangerous gum trees from our backyard a few years ago and we enjoyed his jocular and larrikin humour and were impressed with his wonderful craggy features. Rodney thought he would be a great portrait subject with his piercing blue eyes and strong bone structure.

Rodney has been exploring and experimenting with using media in unorthodox ways recently, for example using charcoal and raw pigment colour with bonding agents and rubbing them into coarse textured board, then overworking with thick and thin layers of crayon and pastel. When the various layers are built up he works in reverse to pull off colour, with rubbing, scaping and scratching to reveal the under layers, often right back to the board (a technique more traditionally described as sgraffito). This results in a wonderfully complex surface that is gorgeous to look at both up close and from a distance.

Congratulations Rodney! you are not only a champion husband but also a champion artist!

Art for charity raffle

Raffle tickets – at the Chemist

$2.00 each

“The Garden of my Mind”  by Pearl Red Moon

“The Garden of my Mind” was created in 2009. Pearl’s studio is in her garden and she is an enthusiastic gardener.

The plants and flowers of the garden, its seasonal cycles of flourishing, dormancy and regeneration are a frequent inspiration.  In this work she portrays a womans face surrounded by abstract fragments representing lush & exotic plant forms.

Pearl Red Moon is a well known mixed media/textile artist who has exhibited, taught art workshops and sold her work to collectors in Australia, New Zealand and the USA for over 20 years.   She now lives in Murrurundi.

Pearl’s Gallery is next door - call 0431 566 021

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Tickets will also be available for sale at:

Murrurundi Art Prize - RSL Hall  Exhibition dates are:   May 2 –19        Open 10am to 4pm        Fri/Sat/Sundays.

Drawn on May 20^th 2013

Winner will be notified by phone

All proceeds go to Murravale Community Hostel

Arranged by Murrurundi Arts Council

The Arts Council are putting my mixed media work "The garden of my Mind" up for raffle. For those of you who read my blog and live locally it will be on display in the Chemist shop window and tickets available to buy there. The work is about 40x45cm.

If you live far away or overseas and want to buy tickets you can forward $$$ to me by Paypal or email me for direct debit details. I'll write your name and phone number on the ticket stub and email your numbers. If you win the art I'll post it to you free!

new visage

I made another face image to add to the VISAGE book today. This one is a bit "pop art" inspired

Visage book

A couple of days ago I signed up to do a class at the 2013 Textile and Art Academy event in Brisbane. I've long admired the superb felting of textile artist Catherine O'Leary so when I saw she was offering a long and indulgent 5 days of tuition I succumbed to the temptation and signed up. She taught at the same event in 2011 but it coincided with when I recovering from surgery so I couldn't go. At that time the convener of the event, Lena Tisdall, had also been calling for volunteers to join an altered book project which she called Project 22. I joined up along with 21 others. We were allowed a very generous 20 months to create the books which Lena plans to display at the next event coming up at the end of June this year.

Yesterday I got out the book Lena had sent to each of the players. Fortunately she had given very open guidelines that we could choose whatever appealed as a theme for the book. The book for altering was called "Pictorial History of the Brisbane River" and had some lovely black and white photos from over a hundred year period but a book based on that theme had no interest to me....so I dismantled the book by cutting off the spine and glueing groups of 3 pages together to give a nice firm surface to work on. The book is quite small, the pages are 17.5 x 24.5cm

The cover of my altered book - VISAGE

I choose the theme "Visage" for the book ("Facebook" being already taken!)

Today I made a cover and 2 pages for the book. I used an image of the same face cropped to various different sizes and printed them in grayscale through the inkjet printer then over painted them with colour, stencilled, stitched and appliqued in various ways. My plan is to do 12 -20 images of faces in this way.

"Ava" fully framed

Today the work  "Ava wears a Gorgeous Yoke" was finished and mounted in this elaborate backframe. The actual painting on the inner canvas is 40 x 130cm so its one of the largest images I've done. The scale I can work at is limited by the practicality of getting the canvas under the sewing machine arm for embroidery.

The inner edge of the frame is stencilled with pale blue triangles.

Heres a close up picture showing the stitching and embellishment on the lower part of the figure.

I'm going to enter this work for the Muswellbrook Art Prize. It is a major biennial show with a $20,000 first prize. Its also juried so I have to submit the image to the initial selection process first! I put in a work a couple of years ago that was not selected (Rodney got in) but that same work later won first prize in a section of our local art show so I don't think it was too lousy!

Wish me luck!

A thread that runs through

A thread that runs through, day 1

"Ava" is finished and Rodney built the complex frame that I want to mount the work on. When that is complete I'll show the finished item in a future blog.

While he was building the frame I started blocking in a new work on a piece of canvas. The photo above shows what I'd completed after a few hours.

Three days ago I was surfing around internet sites looking at what some other favourite mixed media artists are blogging and doing. I came across a "call for art" from well known USA artist Lesley Riley. She is proposing to publish a book based on pictures that were inspired by quotes. So thinking this was great idea and that I'd like to have a go at contributing I emailed Lesley and got a couple of quotes. She sent me these -

"The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that makes ones life" Georgia O'Keeffe

"Beauty is the sense of life and the awe one has in its presence" Willa Cather

The work that was started today will be based on the first quote by Georgia O'Keeffe (strangely enough even though I've been to Santa Fe in New Mexico, USA, 3 times I've never been to O'Keeffes art museum....??!!)

My concept is to have the central floating figure drawing down threads from above which run through her hands and drape down around her body to start weaving the garment she wears and that the ends of the garment trail off from her feet and drift off the bottom of the canvas.....

a moment to smell the roses and eat the herbs

Coming up from the studio this afternoon I paused for a moment to admire the Madame de Pompadour rose I planted about 6 months ago. It is really flourishing in the present hot dry Summer conditions. It is planted in a large tub placed in the centre of the herb garden. It was photographed with the late afternoon sun low on the horizon behind it. Fanning out behind are Salvias and in the foreground, the herb Dill to the left and Basil on the right. I grew the Basil from seed and we are having a big bunch of it with our dinner salad this evening along with tomatoes from the vege garden.

Ava wears a gorgeous yoke

Not much time to spend in the studio lately so Ava has been progressing slowly. Its probably the biggest canvas I've done and I'm doing a lot of very dense machine embroidery on the surface so it could be another week to get finished yet. I also want to do a rather fancy back frame with some painting on the inset border area so it could likely take the rest of the month.

I've renamed the work "Ava wears a gorgeous yoke" and added some decoration to the neck. The "yoke" is embroidered and appliqued and stitched onto the canvas. The piece hanging in the cleavage is a little bead motif I made a few years ago.

I'm considering entering the work into the Muswellbrook Art Prize if I get it finished in time.

Rodney and I are looking forward to doing a 2-day art workshop starting tomorrow. Our local Arts Council is hosting the very accomplished artist Suzanne Archer to teach a drawing workshop. This will be way, way out of my usual comfort zone as an artist!!!

Su is almost diametrically opposite to me in her mediums and aesthetics. We will be working on paper with black mediums - charcoal and ink.....eeeeek!! no colour! Tonal washes - no opaque paints...it will be still life subject matter such as bones, skulls and other objects and we will be encouraged to work large scale!

I'm already feeling a little daunted.....

New Year, New Work...

I worked on "Valda" for a few days and felt stuck....so I cast her aside (temporarily) and started work on this new figure. It is slightly bigger than real life size, with the canvas measuring  50 x 120cm

Ava, after 3 day

This new picture to be called "Ava"

A lot of layered work on the gown is still in progress. It was a fragment of a cotton hand crotcheted tablecloth which I cut a section out of to fit the figure. Then various parts of the design were painted with different acrylic colours and over that I'm appliqueing, stitching and accenting with dimensional paint. I'm anticipating quite a lot more work to finish the picture, maybe another week....assuming don't get stuck or bored and perhaps she'll get chucked on top of Valda in the "too hard" heap!

Heres a close up picture of the mid section of the image to show the detail

Perhaps the very visually astute of you might notice that the stencil I used on either sides of the face is the same one I cut to stencil the floor a couple of weeks ago!

I am giving away a free calendar featuring some of the art Rodney and I have done in the last couple of years  to the two first people to comment on this blog! Will send free within Australia or anywhere else in the world....(except you Mum, you already have 2...!) Gmail me your address-

HAPPY 2013 EVERYBODY!!!

deck the halls with paint, tra lalalalala laaaah...

Its the last week of school and Rodney is beginning a long break from teaching until February next year. This is also a quiet time at work for me too. I have been doing some art. I got about half way with "Valda" then plunged into starting another larger work which is still in the early stages.

With Rodney off work I've been making lists of tasks that need to be done round the house/garden and spending lots of my time figuring out ways to keep him "occupied". My long suffering beloved patiently goes along with most of this pestering and only occasionally makes excuses for why things can't be achieved on my impossible time scale (mainly because I forget our money tree died....)

The "project of the week" has been to clear out and decorate a verandah that runs down the side of our house and this has progressed well. I wish I'd taken some before shots so you could appreciate the difference. This lovely verandah had become a convenient dumping ground for boxes of miscellaneous stuff and pieces of furniture we couldn't fit in the house. It took a day to clear it out before the floor could be decorated.




































I painted the raw timber floor with cheap pine green fence paint then added some simple hand cut stencil patterns. The picture shows about 2/3rds of the room completed. Today we cleared out the remnants of the junk and now I can access the last part to complete the room . Below is a picture of the remaining raw floor boards to paint.

We have some longer term plans to insulate and line the ceiling with "mini orb" corrugated iron and a fabulous little pot belly stove to install....(about items #87 and #124 on Rodneys list.... he will be looking forward to going back to work for a rest)