Garden and Flowers

 

 

There are earlier versions of this picture of my mothers kitchen garden in Newcastle here.

 

I've been there for the last few days, spending a bit of time with her and in her garden, doing a bit of weeding, as well as painting and taking a few photos of the flowers blooming at the moment

 

 

A few geranium flowers and leaves and a bit of the terracotta pot the plant grows in: I started this with leftover paint when I was about to head home

 

 

 

A camelia flower opening with some leaves and another bud.

 

I don't usually put straight photography up on this site, here's some flowers(mostly) from the garden. Mum's not so mobile so I took them to show her some flowers she might not otherwise see

 

 

I'm not sure what this weedy tree is, the yellow bell flowers look cool tho.

 

 

Another shrub whos name I don't know

 

 

This wandering dew has a cute little blue flower

 

 

Among the rain lilies

 

 

native violets

 

 

this lurid azalea reminds me of photos of sea slugs with their crazy frills

 

 

shooting with a fairly large aperture(f3.2) and single point autofocus really brings out whatever is in the shallow field of focus.

 

Here's a spray of flowers on a purple weed with focus at slightly different distances.

 

AF on phones (and point and click cameras) gives me the willies, its hopeless if there's any clutter . Then there's the tiny CCD and lens. A $200 android and a DSLR and a couple of lenses doesn't cost any more than a current iphone, less in fact. If taking photos is important get a camera. With an app to control it it is integrated with your phone anyway

 

 

camelias...

 

 

The garanium I started painting above

 

 

A dragonfly in silhouette - it stayed there for a while, so we were wondering if it just oulted and was waiting for its carapace and wings to harden

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