The Meteora

A day trip on a bus from Thessaloniki took us to the monasteries in the municipiality of Meteora in Greece. Organising the bus trip was as memorable as the actual trip. The bus wound its way up winding roads occasionally giving us glimpses of one of the monasteries.

Rising from the flat Plains of Thessaly are pinnacles of sandstone and conglomerate rocks. Perched on a number of these pinnacles are monasteries built by hermit monks who came to the area in the 9th century. From 1356, these monks started building the monasteries seeking security and isolation from Turkish invaders. Only a small number of the 20 monasteries operate today having survived WW2 bombing, lootings and the ravages of time.

My painting is based on the best photo I managed to take - the Agia Triada (Holy Trinity) monastery. It featured in the James Bond movie "For Your Eyes Only".

The artwork is meant to convey a sense of the secure isolation sought by the hermit monks. You can't help but be impressed with their dedication.

I added coarse sand to acrylic paint for the painting of the pinnacles.

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I was born in Queensland, lived for most of my working life in Melbourne and retired in the Coffs Harbour region of NSW. So, what do we oldies do when we retire?

Travel? My husband and I had spent several years travelling around Australia and overseas after we retired. We had sold up pretty much all of our belongings so that we could travel without the worries of house ownership. By 2018, we were ready to settle down again and bought a house in Sapphire Beach, just north of Coffs Harbour.

Now we were really retired and suddenly had a lot of time on our hands . We also had a house again but no furniture or furnishings. So, I did what a lot of other retirees do - I decided to try painting. I had missed out on finger-painting as a youngster as we didn't go to kindergarten and I had had very limited exposure to art at school or at home. So art was something really, really different for me.

Since then, I have managed to fill the house with paintings of some of the places we travelled. In some of the early pieces, I tried a variety of different techniques but I have narrowed my artwork down to mostly acrylics and charcoal. I am inspired by the changing faces of landscapes and also by the character in a human face - how do you captue that?

Currently, I am self-taught but am now searching for workshops with other artists in order to develop further. I am fascinated by how the viewer "sees" art or how the brain perceives art. An artist can create a scene in the viewer's mind with fewer strokes than even the artist realises. This is what I would like to explore further.