Bird life

I'm lucky that I live close enough to be able to walk to work. Some mornings when I'm running late I take a short cut across a tiny suburban park. It's just a patch of green with a playground, surrounded by houses. In the last few weeks the magpie geese have arrived, as I cross the park they take off in an eruption of honking and flapping wings.

I've had a look online, and I don't think they're migratory, I think it's more that by the end of the dry season there's not much left that's green out bush, so they come into town to the watered parks and playing fields.

Down near the beach the nuts are out on the casuarina trees, and the black cockatoos are enjoying them - very noisily and messily - squabbling over each branch and dropping a carpet of nuts and twigs to the ground.

It's hardly surprising that birds keep turning up in my artwork, here's a recent painting I did of a curlew.

Lovely to see some bird photos on Cathy Cullis's blog last week - which partly inspired this post!

Hope you're having a great weekend, we've had some decent rain in the last few days - at last!!- so I'm feeling a bit saner!

Park painting and some ancient history

Here are some photos of my large painting in progress. I'm not sure whether it's finished or not!

I'm so used to working on a small scale that I found it quite difficult to be consistent with this, every time I had a painting session, it seemed to come out in a different style, some parts very stylised, some parts painted loosely, some more realistic...

But by co-incidence, the first Tactile Arts members show of the year has the theme of 'Birds'. So I've put this painting in (in this possibly finished state!) along with some smaller works. The opening is next Friday 5th April, do come along if you're in Darwin!!

The painting reminds me of one - much larger - that I did at Uni back in the mid 80's. So here is the ancient history! ...I'd had a friend from my hometown to stay for the weekend, and when they left I couldn't face going to the studio, couldn't see the point of painting, I was feeling homesick and sorry for myself. So I did what I do, I went for a walk and took my sketchbook, and did some charcoal drawings in a tiny park - a square of grass surrounded by flower beds with rose bushes, a couple of bench seats, the whole thing fenced with iron railings. The drawings I did were quick, slight, but they were the start of a series of paintings.

When I read this back it doesn't sound like a significant event! But for me it was some kind of turning point, the feelings I was struggling with went into the paintings which were for me about leaving home symbolised by the relationship between mother and daughter.
(The paintings are long gone, but I might beable to copy a photo to show you another time!)

The park in my new painting is huge compared to that little city square, it has formal gardens and fountains, a community veggie garden, playgrounds, grassy areas, huge trees, a skate park... plenty of inspiration for a whole series of paintings!

I hope you're having a relaxing Easter. I had a long list of jobs to tackle in the garden, the house and arting, but have a bit of a cold, so I've been indulging in sleeping in and relaxing and my list of jobs will have to wait for another time!!