I Love a Sunburned Country

‘Lost’, Frederick McCubbin 1886. The painting is also known as ‘The Lost Child’, and was created at the Box Hill Artist’s Camp. It is Australia Day today, and in reflecting on what it means to be Australian one must eventually come to think about the land itself.

Although I grew up in the city, there were many visits to the country, and several camping trips in the bush. I even recall once trying my hardest to get romantically lost at Hanging Rock – but that was rather difficult with a fifty other tourists scrambling around pretending to do the same thing.

In my early teens I bought a print of Frederick McCubbin’s (1855–1917) painting Lost. I found the picture so evocative; dreamy. It is a quintessential image of the Australian bush: mysterious, frightening, unsettling.

I even recall once trying my hardest
to get romantically lost at
Hanging Rock…

It still looks just like that today, and looking at the painting I can easily imagine myself sitting on a stump amongst the itchy grass, hearing nothing but the incessant buzzing of the insects and birdcalls, or the rustle of some creature in the underbrush, the sun all the while beating down overhead.

Today I celebrated the day with friends on a picnic in the Botanic Gardens – and annoyingly I still managed to get sunburned despite the cloud cover (darn those UV rays). I should have been wearing a straw hat like the girl in the painting.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

(Excerpt from Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country) 

Fly Girl

Today I was doing some photoshoots for the fashion journal, and when I was done, found myself fooling round in front of the camera. (I was pleased with how wavy my hair was after being in a plait yesterday and wanted to photograph it for posterity as I’m planning to cut it off soon). A few playful shots of tossing my hair turned into a concept for a flying girl picture.

Flying girl of course won’t be convincing if she looks like she’s standing on tiptoe, so I pulled out a little stool and poised to jump. It was tricky timing the jump with the camera shutter. It was on a two second timer, and it took quite a few frames to figure exactly when to leap so that the flash would catch me midair.

I ended up with three or four usable shots, and with a bit of Photoshop trickery, merged one of those with a shot of my upper body. Add a bit of motion blur, and I was ready to fly.

Unhappy with my own existing cloud photographs, I logged onto StockXchng and sourced an image of golden clouds in a blue sky that happily had a moon in it. (I made that bigger.) I also needed to match my skin tone with the background, and used a Deep Yellow Photo Filter. Then I added a few more grungy effects using PhotoFrame just for kicks. I’m flying!

And just for fun I did an underwater version as well, finding another great image on StockXchng of water bubbles. I’m swimming through hoops!

Thanks to Antonio Gillo for the ‘Clouds and Moon’ image, and Oktaviani Marvikasari for the ‘Water Bubbles’ photo.

Gabriele Münter: Paintings of home

Murnau, 1933

I bought a 2011 calendar by teNeues this week, featuring covers of Vogue from the ‘NineTeens’, Twenties and Thirties. I was tempted to buy one of the enormous art calendars – beautiful posters with a few tiny numbers at the bottom – but was deterred by both the price ($65) and the impracticality, as I like to be able to write on the days.

However, the ones I was admiring featured the work of the German artist Gabriele Münter (1877–1962). Surprisingly, she was not an artist I was familiar with from my art school days, and I am embarrassed to admit I only discovered her work via a calendar a few years ago!

‘Farmhouse On a Hill’, 1908In 1911 Münter, along with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded the avant-garde expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Prior to this she lived for a long while in the Bavarian market town of Murnau, where many of her landscape paintings were created, placing an emphasis of nature and opposing German modernity.

It is these serene landscapes that I particularly love: the uncomplicated, stylised shapes that are usually thickly outlined; the gorgeous colour palette and homely scenes. I find them comforting, soothing, as though I could step into Münter’s canvases and come home. 

‘Blue Mountain’, 1909

Vintage Vietnam

On one of my last days in Saigon last year, I spent some time in a little independent art space called Lac Hong Gallery. I had already purchased some original etchings at another gallery, but here I found a little box containing some vintage greeting cards.

Three of the five cards I bought are designs embroidered in silk thread; the other two are printed on silk. Faintly embossed on the back of them are the words: Xunhasaba, Hanoi Vietnam, Handmade.

Although the plain cream cards are yellow and foxed with age, they are such a quaint souvenir of a bygone era. They deserve to be framed, rather than written in. I wonder if someone in a hundred years’ time will think the same about a vintage collection of Hallmark cards?

Drawing Naked Ladies

What an awesome look of concentration!

Last Wednesday evening I went to a life drawing class for the first time in over a decade. I was more excited than nervous, because after all, drawing naked ladies is like riding a bike, right? You don’t forget how.

I had plenty of art materials – still in their old tin biscuit box – and had only to buy paper, which I did on my way to the converted church in Armadale, several suburbs east of where I live. I arrived early, and was let in by the dancing instructor from the class next door.

It was early evening, but still light, though overcast with rain. Light filtered through the leadlight windows and filled the room, with its vaulting ceilings, with a serene ambience. What a lovely place to draw!

Two to five minute poses

As expected, we started with one and two minute poses; moved on to five and tens; and ended with three longer 20 minute poses. From the first moment I put conté to paper, I was thinking: “angles! Look for the angles!” That was what my first life-drawing lecturer had said to me in my first year of art school: look for the shapes and angles the body makes, and that will guide your proportions. It really works.

I found myself from time to time drawing what I thought should be there rather than what really was before me – I had to remind myself to look objectively. Hands are less of a challenge now than when I was 18, but foreshortened feet can still put me on my mettle.

By the end of the three-hour class I was still excited and quite pleased with the results. My hand/eye co-ordination was still there! Work and weather foiled my plans to return tonight, but I’ll be back next week.

A crowd of easelsThe church annexe is filled with a lovely ambient lightA picturesque setting for a life modelThe first sheet … ha! those feet!Nude: front and centre

Thanks to Adolpho for taking the pics of me.