No time at the easel this week. I tell you, that Karl Marx was onto something about the demands of capitalism.
I did, however, want to share with you this still life comprising objects found in the gutter on the corner of Bourke and William Streets, Melbourne. It tells you a lot about this most European of Australian cities.
When I am not painting, I go to work. It fills the days and pays for food. I also get to spend time doing interesting things with people I like. A win all around.
I use an old Dimple whisky bottle to hold water. I try to drain it twice a day, but sometimes I forget. Here it is on my office desk, with the sun blind drawn.
Painted on an A4 canvas sheet, thumbtacked to a cardboard box.
Very little time at easel this week. Duties of various kinds demanded my attention.
That is a pity because as we ease into winter the light is hitting at sharper, more interesting angles. Here is an example of what I mean: the corner kitchen window being bombarded by the late autumn sun.
Duty called me away from the easel this week. So here is one I painted quite a few years ago and I think I never got around to posting. It is the sunset over Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, viewed from somewhere near the Nara Peace Park.
At this time of year Canberra is one of the most beautiful cities you could hope to see. The original planners and planters did a bang up job. And the fake Lake works very well, so long as you do do not swim or (heaven forbid) fish in it.
Another still life composed on the kitchen bench.
A friend pointed me in the direction of Zurbaran – both the elder and the younger – the other day (thanks Kerry!). I was quite taken with the bright foregrounds they sometimes used in their austere still-life paintings. With their example in mind, I painted this in oil on MDF whilst listening to the Sydney Swans put North Melbourne to the sword.
The aspect ratio of this painting is not my usual. I had to paint it on a 1 foot square board, to fit a secondhand frame I picked up at the Op Shop. $8. Why pay more?
I used burnt umber mixed with Prussian blue to create the background. I think it makes for a richer, more profound darkness than plain ivory black. I used viridian to make the shadows on the mandarins. It is a magic colour for darkening reds and oranges. I used yellow to brighten the high points on the fruit. I went a bit crazy with adding highlights in titanium white, and had to tone some of them down: it looked like hundreds of camera flashes going off. No black paint was harmed (or indeed touched) in the making of this picture.
In Chromorama, Riccardo Falcinelli says that Chardin painted neutral, darkish brown backgrounds in order to express the notion that the brightly coloured fruit in the foreground would one day fade and rot to a similar colour. His pictures were metaphysical exercises, it seems.
The dark ground also helps the colours to pop. It seems to me Chardin may have also had this in mind. The metaphysical hypothesis also fits and is a further, not incompatible, explanation for what is in front of us, I guess.
These were leftovers about to be turned into a sandwich. A fate that, in one way or another, awaits us all.
I not only wanted to paint a face, I wanted to paint a child’s face viewed from above. Several degrees of difficulty later, this is the result: an acrylic of the head of Jesus from Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges.
I did not have a lot of time this week, so this was done in acrylics on a round wooden placemat from Officeworks, about the size of a small dinner plate.
My wife says he looks a little mischievous. I think it might all be in the eyebrows. In any event, in this statue Jesus looks like he is about to purposively stride away from Mary’s sheltering arms.
Copied a Chardin still life with plums and baguettes this weekend. Partly to test how Chardin worked the God-like trick and partly to dispel the stresses of life. It worked on both counts.
Plums are such an interesting range of colours. To paint these I bought a purple colour formulated by Michael Harding: it is called belladonna and it is beautiful. Purple, but shading into a deep burgundy. Delicious, utterly delicious, though inedible. I added some Prussian blue to create an almost-black sheen to the plums. By comparison, the bread was a piece of cake. All done an A4-sized piece of canvas on board.
Flinders Street station is big, sprawling and of its time. The sort of architecture you might have seen in any biggish city in a remote corner of the late Victorian/Edwardian British Empire. Trains from all over Melbourne zoom still through its innards, but most of the upper floors seem to have been abandoned long ago. There is an empty ballroom up in the roof. It has a sprung floor, but the only visitors to it are pigeons and ghosts.
This is the corner of an abandoned office in a quiet corner of one of the upper floors. It is the late afternoon. The evening sun is streaming in and creeping across the dusty floor. I saw this room during an art show that consisted of empty, old offices mocked up to look like empty, old offices. It was most effective. I loved it, and I am very glad my city is full of old, not-terribly-well-maintained remnants of long, long ago.
The Darebin Creek has a fish ladder in it that doubles as stepping stones. The fish climb up the creek and the people cross it. Multi-tasking.
Phil McAloon's paintings 