CREEK PLAY Series
2007 - 2008
I live on the escarpment which overlooks the suburbs south of Wollongong, Lake Illawarra and the Tasman Sea. The property on which I live used to be a dairy farm. It has a bit of everything: grassy paddocks, forested slopes and patches of rainforest, particularly around the watercourses. A creek falls from the sandstone cliffs of the escarpment above and flows past my place on its way to the lake. A forest of eucalypts, wattles and rainforest trees such as lilly-pilly, whale-bone, cabbage-tree palm and fig house a wonderful variety of birds, some marsupials and feral deer.
I used to paint these scenes figuratively, but lately I convey an abstract impression of what I experience.
In the ‘Creek Play’ Series I have taken the canvases to the creek and painted on them with wet compressed charcoal. I also painted some with ground pigments from rocks gathered from the creek. These are mixed with acrylic binder. Some extra mixed-media work may have been done with tissue paper.