Out of the comfort zone...

...and on to the Nullarbor Plain.




I finally had to do the thing I dreaded most - paint a picture. You know, a "Ooh, look, I think those are trees" kind of picture. Fortunately, because this was Jan, this wasn't a purely representational exercise. I think she called it "broken colour" when she described what she wanted us to do. The mission was to take a photo of a landscape and build up the image using paint-brush marks. It was our own form of Impressionism, if you will - to see what we could create by working with Gouache's ability to be both layered like oil and washed like watercolour.

I love looking around the room to see what everyone chooses: a barn in a Duncan field becomes an almost Provencal-like scene with gorgeous golds, oranges and blues; a Victoria garden becomes a large, bold field of thickly lovely colour points; an aerial view of the dusty Nullarbor plain becomes...

I can still barely look at my own work - it takes the cushioning of time before I gain any perspective and before the shoulder-critics give up and go away. It is a slow layering of confidence and a concurrent erosion of the expectation of perfection that lets me look back at earlier posts and say "that was pretty good, I like what I did" or "hmmm, what was that". It will be a while before the Nullarbor becomes mine.