Natural textures and rhythms in nature is something that I find very beautiful and something I'm always trying to capture in my paintings. Tree bark is always lovely but I find burnt wood especially wonderful. There's something both ancient and mesmerising about the dark patterns. This is something I've tried to capture with Apollyon. The image is taken from a photograph I took of a burnt stump in the Bunyip Ranges. I use a technique where I set my camera (phone) to panoramic and then proceed to walk around the tree, giving me a nice wallpaper shot, almost like I'm able to unwrap the bark and lay it flat.
This is certainly an exercise in patience, especially for me as I'm usually a fast painter. And while working on this piece, rather than getting bored of feeling like I'm painting the same thing over and over, I imagine I'm depicting an aerial landscape, flying over this alien world and that each blister of bark could be a house; they all look the same and yet they're all different, all unique. Some are expansive, others are all crammed together in a narrow strip.
Completing this painting has been a meditative process for me and I hope you enjoy getting lost in it as much as I did.