Old highway helipad

TSandstone is a big part of the series of Sydney landscapes I've been painting the last few years ,'Urban pastoral, so I've been looking for a good place to paint the stone in the surrounding landscape.

 The Newcastle freeway cuts between cliffs  blasted into  the sandstone between the edge of Sydney around Wahroonga and just past Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury River. I remember how impressed my father, a civil engineer, was when we drove along for the first time.

My friend Rachel offered to drive up to look around and have a picnic. This spot is on the old Pacific Highway. I took a medium sized canvas along

 After a second visit

Thanks to Rachel for driving and keeping company for a picnic and painting. We found this spot on the old highwy where we could park, that's marked as a helipad(I think) with a good view of this cutting on the freeway, as well as the river

Woolloomooloo Map - the Gunnery

An aerial view of Woolloomooloo, portal to a 3D virtualisation of the Gunnery that Marcus Gillezeau has another artist creating - details coming soon. In the meantime check out Jasper Cool's 7 minute Gunnery Sizzle on Vimeo, for a taste of the Gunnery artists community of 1985-91

 

 

the painting finished. 

This is a handheld shot from the middle of the flooding rain in Sydney when the light was dim, so it's maybe a bit blurry, and you can see the smear left across the bay by a drip falling between camera and canvas. When the rain finally stops in a day or 2 I'll reshoot more precisely

You can follow its creation in the images below

Still a lot of mistakes and bits to fix  or finish but I'll take a break for a bit to get a few other things done and defrag my brain a little

 

 

 

It looks almost done with the greens and other colours in the foliage brought in, and some light and shadow to give a bit of depth. A lot more repairs can be done yet, and some will,  "finishing it" is like iterating over Zeno's paradox. So after a bit of work on railway tracks and boats, I'll take a break for a few days
 

 

 

Adding green and highlighting light and dark, and making lots of repairs

 

 

 

 

All blocked in now, though with plenty of errors, whole blocks misplaced etc. (I'll leave it to others to catalogue them). And water in the harbour over the red mud.

 

 

 

There's a few completely empty blocks and missing lanes, and everything's still in unnatural colour but there's paint spread over most of the surface now of  kinda recognisble map

 

 

 

 

 

AThe beginnings of an aerial view of Woolloomooloo Bay centred on the Gunnery, the former artists squat where I started out. Its for an intro sequence to a Gunnery 3D virtualisation

 

The Harbour from Watsons Bay

I went back down to Watsons Bay to try to finish this view of the harbour. This is the third time I'd taken the canvas there. Earlier versions are here

 

 Stopframe video compresses 100 minutes of painting to 40 seconds. Funny