Saturday, October 3, 2015

Art Exhibition - 'The Grower's Almanac'


It is a privilege and pleasure to show a collection of 18 pieces painted during the past 12 months at The Art Vault, Mildura. It is a wonderful gallery run by Julie and Kevin Chambers and the great staff there, who always make you welcome.

Artist's Statement
A grower’s almanac is an annual publication that includes information about the seasons, astronomical information and other tabular observations arranged according to a calendar and planting dates.

This exhibition features selected works depicting the diversity of life encountered over a cycle of seasons in our irrigated gardens and horticultural areas, and in our surrounding arid bush.

In a world of supermarkets, and the demands of modern workplace and technology, it can be easy for our intimate connection with the earth and its seasons to become diminished, and find ourselves left wondering about the passage of time.

When you take a flower and slowly look at it for its own beauty or to represent it, it is the world and its bounty for that period.

The subjects for this exhibition have been chosen to represent the cardinal points of each season, culminating with spring and its promise of renewal.

Included in this body of work are examples of several systems of oil painting explored by the artist in recent workshops and further studies of the techniques of the old masters.

These include the use of :-
·      ‘grisaille’ –a French term for painting in monochrome, usually shades of grey, as an under-painting or a subject of beauty in its own right
·      ‘alla prima’ –painting direct from nature
·      the use of lean  and rich palettes
·      big form modelling as a method of underpainting


Each work has been painted in oils from close observations of life, using sight- sized measurement to establish proportions.

They hint of preparation towards some new directions ahead that will encompass painting portraits and the human form.


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