Manly Sunset

I drew this on site at Shelly Beach in the last half hour of summer light. I was sitting on the sand with my pastels when a couple of people climbed up onto the rocks and settled in, watching the sun drop behind the Norfolk Island pines on Manly’s main beach.

The light was fading fast, so I worked quickly, letting the pastel catch the soft shifts in the sky and on the water. The textured paper holds the colours gently, and the whole scene sits enveloped in a pastel-hued tranquillity — that easy, familiar calm anyone who knows Manly recognises at the end of a warm day.

A quiet coastal moment, drawn from life.

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BEYOND THE SEE

I paint images that sit somewhere between realism and dreams. I’m influenced by memory, mythology and the magical realist tradition.

Early in my career, I worked as a newspaper photographer and journalist. I inherited from that experience a tendency to crop in hard and look for strong, immediate compositions.

Long periods of travel and immersion in other cultures, particularly in Latin America, opened up for me different ways of experiencing and understanding reality.

The work of Henri Rousseau and Frida Kahlo is among my influences. What draws me to their work is a way of seeing and feeling beyond the surface — allowing imagination, feeling, symbolism and sensuality to coexist with the observed world.

Follow me on Instagram @ShereeGlasson, where I post regular updates on my work.