Still life with tomatoes

Still life with tomatoes
60.5 x 80 cm (24" x 30")

There has been a large canvas sitting on my easel for a while, but I hadn't decided what to paint on it.  Then some tomatoes and onions painted themselves onto my Brian Wood jug picture (last post) and before I knew it they had spread onto my large canvas.

Once started I couldn't stop. I painted all weekend and now have a large still life with bottles and tomatoes. The jug planted itself in the picture too and needed three bottles to balance it.

Large painting dwarfs the small one

Addendum on 4 February:the painting is still morphing. It seemed too bland so I darkened the background and foreground.

Today's picture:

Tomatoes, jug and onions

The Brian Wood ceramic jug has been joined today by some tomatoes and onions. Now it looks a little less lonely.

Addendum (19:30) ...
a bottle wanted to join the group

Jug, tomatoes, onions and wine bottle

Hot, cold, windy, calm

Brisbane waters - flat calm in December

Summer is meant to be sunny, calm, warm and perfect for the beach but this year we have alternating extreme heat, cold, storms, wind and floods.

December was hot and cold, flat calm one day and stormy the next. January has been even more unpredictable.

Stormy seas on the beach tonight

The first week of January was so wet a lot of people were rained out of their camp sites or, in the Hunter valley, flooded out of their homes.  (The coffee shops did very good trade as there was little else to do.)

Then came the heat.  41C on Thursday was incapacitating and was followed by big winds and thunderstorms that chased away the rest of the campers and cut power to eighty thousand homes in western Sydney.  Temperatures dropped from 41Cto 22C in a matter of hours and yesterday was cold, windy and wet. Today is still cool with stormy seas.

We are not alone I know; Melbourne and Adelaide have been even more extreme and bush fires in Victoria and Western Australia have razed great swathes of land. 

Our recalcitrant government is disinclined to take action against climate change but lack of demand for coal and gas might force the issue. China, it appears, is leading the way.

The local papers this week

Peninsula News

Express Advocate

Exhibition at Gnostic Manor in Woy Woy

Phew ... 30 paintings hung in two hours. The Gnostic Manor Cafe has a proper hanging system but a very overworked one, with hooks that are sometimes dodgy or non-functional.

Hanging 30 paintings under these circumstances is difficult, let alone in two hours. But they are up and they look fine.

Yachts and swimmers.

Swimmers 1

I think the yachts will be more popular - but you never know. The cafe owner liked the swimmers (as do I).

They have a three dimensional look as I painted swim suits on life drawings and sewed them onto existing paintings.

I have written on the labels that 50% of the proceeds goes to charity (buyers can choose between Surf lifesavers, Bob Brown Foundation, Amnesty International and Medicin Sans Frontier) and today the cafe owner said that in that case they will not take their normal 30% commission. I thought that was pretty nice.

The exhibition is up until 31 January, so if you are reading this and within cooee of Woy Woy, drop in for a look!

(Swimmers on my website.)