Month: November 2018

A gummy bear and an invitation

November 18, 2018

Orange gummy bears taste nothing like an orange, and don’t get me started on the pineapple ones.  However, they capture light well.  Here is my painting of a gummy bear remembering something, as myriad emotions play across her troubled features.

Also, if you are in Melbourne over Christmas, you should go and see the Linden Postcard Show.  It is on from  23 November 2018 to 10 February 2019, at 26 Acland Street, St Kilda.  All works are small, 8 by 10, and there are some pretty good pictures in the show.  This could be your chance to snare a future masterpiece!

I have four paintings in the Postcard Show, and they are at the bottom of this post.

Gummy bearLindon post card entry

When is a tart a tetrad?

November 16, 2018

This is a fruit tart from the Gelobar in East Brunswick.  In colour theory it is also a tetrad, which is a harmonious combination of two sets of complementary colours: red and green, violet and yellow.  The flavours and colours were all in perfect harmony, but it still made me fat.

Gelobar fruit tart

The Centenary

November 11, 2018

We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living

Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,

And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh

W. B. Yeats

Thomas Dunlop Stevenson left the warm, bright sands of Cottesloe Beach on the shore of the Indian Ocean for the mud, filth and horror of Ypres and the Somme.  He was buried by shellfire, dug out from the earth, and later suffered a gunshot wound.  He did well as an officer and engineer, and was decorated for his work in front of the frontline.  He made it back to Australia, where he died in 1932 at the age of 44.  I based this painting of him on a black and white photo from around 1920.

This post is to pay respect to him and to all the children, women and men whose lives have been burdened, or continue to be burdened, by the sorrow and the pity of war.

TD Stevenson - final

The geometry of basketball

November 2, 2018

Gym floors are made of polished hardwood for practical reasons.  The various coloured lines painted on them must, I assume, also serve some practical purpose.  These lines are arranged in recondite patterns that I cannot begin to understand.  They are, however, one of my favourite accidentally beautiful things.

I found an old hand-made frame in a junk shop.  It was crying out to frame a picture of a gym floor.  Who am I to keep it from its destiny?

Court