Another of My Australian Birds with Australian Flowers. These are Pardalotes or peep-wrens and while these birds are insect eaters I could not resist placing them in a bottle brush. I saw some in Tasmania as this variety is more common in the south. In this painting I have used a dry pigment drawing and lots of water to set the pigment and to allow interesting rivers of colour and bends of colour. This has been fixed with a matt glaze to protect and to stop glare. It is framed in white floater frame.
Being an expressive painter – I deconstruct the forms and rely on emotional translations. My handling of environments is never literal; I want some things to be lost and rediscovered in the translation.
I’ve been an artist for more than 25 years and in that time my interests have remained around the things I see here in Australia mostly landscape. I’ve exhibited in galleries and events on east coast of Australia during that time and concentrated my efforts on Australian scenes and Birds with Movement and Light painted in my own style of "expressive impressionism” or "Post Impressionism".
I used transparent watercolour to begin with and took the things I learned from experimenting with water-based mediums on paper to acrylic medium on stretched canvas or linen. It’s a process of using multiple transparent layers of paint and dry medium fixed with acrylic painting medium. Because it takes some time for the layers to dry between coats I work in series of several similarly themed paintings over a matter of weeks. This allows me to incorporate random water and brushwork effects into the representational forms I create. All my works are original ideas and subjects are not reproduced unless in a completely different composition.