Whisper over my Shoulder

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.

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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