Rainbows in Shadows 2 Rainbow Lorikeets

Two lorikeets in foliage with abstracted leaf forms. Lorikeets come into my garden each afternoon and watching them feed is a great pleasure for me. This bright expressive painting of birds in movement has an interesting one of a kind composition focussing of the lorikeets that come alive because of the light background.
My Lorikeet series is about seeing simple light interactions with familiar forms that make the viewer take a second to understand the subject, the direction of light, and the surrounds. The object is not described explicitly but incongruously suggested by marks made by man-made objects to suggest the shape of natural things.
I use lots of different photos of my subject to start with; to try to get a sense of the subject and composition. I would also look at video I’ve taken to get the feeling of the movement and light that I would want to show.
I find an interesting environment, photograph it from different perspectives, make a compositional drawing with dry media on paper then paint from all of those influences. On the canvas, the images appear, disappear then reappear during the painting process, adding or subtracting elements using the medium in washy transparent to opaque acrylic paint. I seek “painterly” environments with acrylic media, which is often used in a very graphic sharp-edged way.
One of the most difficult things to show in a painting is movement but in nature nothing is ever still. My paintings show a truth about what an artist can see which is the opposite of the photograph.

Follow

With a career spanning almost 30 years, Deb undertook most of her training in Canberra at the Canberra Institute of Art through open access in the early 1990s. Originally from Brisbane she returned in 1996 and has lived and worked here since.

She is an expressionist artist who combines the painterly qualities of acrylics and dry pastel fixed with acrylic medium in many transparent layers to show the underlying drawing. Many of her Paintings are purely acrylic as her practice began in water-based media. She focuses on movement and light on Australian subjects.
Over the past few of years, she has been extending her Australian flower compositions to convey the dance of light across their unusual forms and enlarging them to show how abstract and beautiful they are. The backgrounds mimic light distortions as if referencing some of the effects of the camera obscurer. The forms that constitute the focal points emerge from the surface as the final layers are applied. It’s the desire to make her subject come alive with movement and light that drives this exploration in the expressive gestural mark.

Living close to Mount Coot-Tha National Park in Brisbane and the nearby Botanical Gardens has greatly inspired her recent work. Her compositions are derived from multiple photos and video taken while walking and then compiled in the studio. She starts with a charcoal drawing as a reference then moves on to pastel drawing for the colour study. The studio space is then prepped with several canvases on different easels so she can move around the room working on one piece then the other to work around wet and drying surfaces. Plein air painting is something she goes back to from time to time to reinvestigate the light.

View Deb Parker Artist on Bluethumb