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Afternoon Storm Clouds, Point Pilcher, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on linen, 2024– sold

This is my studio version of my earlier plein air work from an earlier post on this website. My studio paintings are more detailed and refined than my plein air works which are recorded quickly and expressively, but they are usually more imaginative and inventive too. I work from my photos but I always stray away from the photo-mechanical image of the photo and into a more interior space. I think this is a good example of what happens when I’m in a comfortable, controlled environment, with good appropriate music, lots of breaks and time to think.

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Sunrise, Evans Lookout, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on linen, 2024– sold

The Sun’s early rays bouncing off the underside of the nights retreating clouds reminded me of Homer’s description of The Child of Morning calling it rosy-fingered Dawn. So in some ways this is a Romantically inspired picture. In other ways I wanted a strong geometric composition that, at least for me, was reminiscent of my early heroes of American Abstract painting like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. A homage that is also romantic for the heroic days of Modernism. The new shoots on the leaning gum and the sun’s morning rays are both images of promise and renewal.

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Sun Patterns at Mount Solitary, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on linen, 2024 – sold

The foothills of this rocky ridge that appears to float in the Jamison Valley are rippled like wind swept waves, moving across a fluid surface. In fact they take the form of waves because they are subject to the same forces of wind, water, heat and gravity that we see at a beach or from a boat. They are also, like waves, subject to time and rhythm, only in the case of these hills and escarpments it is the rhythm of geological time. The clouds above, also subject to these forces, allows patches of sunlight to ripple across the crests of rock, fern and trees below, creating beautiful patterns that drift and change as the afternoon unfolds.

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Beyond the Pulpit, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on linen, 2024

Most of the lookouts and landmarks in the Blue Mountains were named by British Explorers in the Nineteenth Century who were unaware or simply not very interested in the place names given by the predominantly Darug and Gundungurra people, indigenous to the area. Many of these explorers and pioneers were religious and church attendance was still high. Hence, we get names like Pulpit Rock. They liked that name so much that they used it again for another rock form near Mount Victoria a few kilometers along the western track to the potential farmland below the Western escarpment. The Nineteenth Century was ironically the same time that Romanticism, with its reverence for the natural world with its sublime beauty, and awe inspiring power to create and destroy, was the dominant force in European art. Many people were starting to take a renewed interest in the beauty of nature that had more to do with their distant ancestors’ Pantheistic beliefs, and less to do with the centuries of Christian doctrine they had brought with them from Europe. My title for this painting hints at the changes in thinking that were happening during the first half of the Nineteenth Century and our inherited love, and sometimes fear, of a more natural and challenging landscape.

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Afternoon Storm Clouds at Point Pilcher- Plein Air Study. 40cm x 70cm, acrylic on board, 2024

Point Pilcher is on the edge of the Grose Valley near Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains. I often kick start a series of new works with some plein air sessions making smaller, more expressive and immediate works like this.