Sand angel

Sand Angel

This Easter weekend
I learned how
to make
a sand- angel.



Here's how:

May you find many eggs ...

Yes, rabbits do lay Easter eggs

The charm of very early morning

This morning at 6am I woke to a full moon streaming through the window. Outside, the dawn was just breaking and I took photos looking up and down my suburban street.

Full moon and street lights

Dawn breaks and the last star shines

Spider time

The calendar says it is autumn and spiders know it too because despite the summer-like heat they are dancing their autumn dance. 

we can see you

The garden is full of leaves hanging in mid air between branches, off washing lines and fences, each one curled, with a spider inside the curl patiently waiting for a prey who don't see its gossamer web. They are spun quickly and a path that was clear one minute is an obstacle race the next.  

patiently waiting

Not only leaf spiders but every other type seems to be active as well, scuttling up walls, spinning webs along the ceiling, hiding in every nook and cranny. 

Where were they in summer when we needed them to catch the evening mosquitoes?

Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Sydney

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is a special sort of pianist, one of those musicians who translate music with their whole body, a phenomenon you sometimes see with string players who stand to play but seldom with pianists, even the most active and virtuosic. Aimard played  Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regardes sur l'Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Contemplations of the Christ Child) last night at the Angel Place concert hall.

It was an extraordinary concert that got a standing ovation, not so common for solo pianists.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays colours

Firstly to the music: I had heard the excellent pre-concert talk by David Garrett, who spoke about Messiaen's religiosity, his detailed knowledge of Roman Catholic music (he was Church organist for years) and his use of this knowledge in the music he wrote. I prepared to hear something I could relate to church music but if there were references to church liturgy and music (and I am sure there were many) I missed them completely. 

David Garrett - pre-concert talk

Instead I heard very modernist piano music, mostly discordant, very colourful, sometimes melodic and despite the title of the piece, only occasionally what I would call contemplative. I found it unexpected, riveting, mesmerising.

Which brings me to the player, who undoubtedly had much to do with how his audience received the music.  Aimard had been a friend of Messiaen and was a piano student of  Messiaen's wife Yvonne Loriod, herself a virtuoso pianist so he knows the world of Messiaen better than most. As I mentioned above, the music seemed to take over Aimerd physical presence as he played . In the quiet beginnings of this two hour marathon it was only the mouth you noticed, a clenching and un-clenching that made him look as if he was chewing gum. As the concert progressed and the twenty contemplations became raucous this involuntary response enveloped more of Aimard's body. It was as if electrical waves were being transmitted by the piano strings. At times he rose off the stool, sitting a few inches above it with twisted body looking like a contortionist trick. At other times he seemed about to swallow the piano whole, such was his concentration and determination. It was impossible not to be swept away by his playing and the music.

The music was played with brilliance but I still wondered why I found it so very disarming. Was it the religious significance Messiaen gave it that added something I couldn't define?

This evening I have been reading the notes from the concert booklet and discover that the piece was written for Loriod in a period when their love could not be acknowledged. His next major piece was inspired by Tristan and Isolde. Suddenly I feel the pieces clicking into place!

Sugar plums

Sugar plums
(61 x 30.5 cm)

I went looking for some paintable fruit last week and found sugar plums.  I love Pflaumentorte (German plum cake) which is made with sugar plums but it is expensive to make in Australia because the plums are less popular and are offered in small prepacked quantities. Enough for a painting, but not enough for Pflaumentorte.

Sugar plums are purplish with a whitish sheen which makes them interesting to paint. I painted a narrow canvas then couldn't resist painting a larger version as well.I am not sure if the whitish sheen got more pronounced over time or whether I got better at painting it by the second canvas; perhaps both.

Sugar plums II
(60 x 50cm)

Bottles and pears

Bottles and pears

My January exhibition was time consuming to manage and left me little painting time. Once it was finished I had a real urge to paint. The exhibition space influenced the sizes of the canvases I chose as I saw the paintings hanging in the cafe as I bought them: long and square canvases with a 61cm (24") edge.

What fits on long canvases? Well, bottles for one thing; the green (wine) and pink (bubbly) bottles from the exhibition opening party which happened to be still standing on the bench.

I added green pears and wine glasses but it took me a long time and many trials to make the painting interesting.

Progress: bottles and pears

Liquid in the glasses (detail)

Finally, as I was about to paint the whole canvas over, I sat my filled wine glass beside the bottles and noticed the interesting pattern made by the liquid in the glass.

I added some wine  to the second glass and had fun capturing the patterns in paint.

In the meantime the pears had turned a lovely golden shade of yellow, much too beautiful to discard (ie eat) without trying to paint them anew. 

I put them in a bowl and immediately started on a second painting.
 

Bottles and pears 2
(30.5 x 61 cm)

 This second painting was finished in no time and I like it better than the first. 

I don't know whether it was easy to paint because of the time I had already invested in the first painting or whether the autumnal colour combination made it more inspiring and therefore easier to paint.

Recent pictures on the wall

Selby and Friends in Sydney

Haveron, Valve and Selby
(from their brochure)

Music in an intimate atmosphere is what Selby and Friends seem to achieve regardless of whether (like the City Recital Hall in Sydney's Angel Place) the venue is  a little too large to be called intimate.

On Thursday night pianist Kathryn Selby played at Angel Place with two gifted string players, violinist Andrew Halveron and cellist Timo-Veikko Valve, a combination so successful that my concert buddy immediately went looking for a brochure so she could book more concerts in the series.

Valve introduced the second piece, Busoni's Variations on a Finnish Folk Song, by saying it captured Finnish melancholia so well and I prepared for a mournful dirge. Instead Valve seated himself at his cello and played a firecracker of a piece - yes perhaps melancholic, but also exceedingly energetic. A  riveting piece played by a fantastic cellist.

The Schubert Fantasy that Halveron chose to play us after the Busoni was an inspired choice. Very different to Busoni, very Schubert.

Kathryn Selby is an enviable pianist and chooses equally passionate partners to play with. This was a  dream team.

Nana's honeypot

Honeypot with Flowers
61 x 61 cm (20 x 20 ")

Whether a painting is successful has a lot to do with composition and if you get the composition right before you start, painting must be so easy. Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to pre-compose paintings. Instead, try as I might, they grow organically amid much tearing out of hair and rubbing off of colour.

This painting is an example.  I bought some lilies but they were in bud and all but one dropped off the stem before they opened.  The only bloom in the garden was a giant orange hibiscus flower but I picked it and put it on the vase with the lily. This was not a flower combination I would have thought of painting  but I had a square canvas on the easel I wanted to try as a change from oblong and before I had a chance to reconsider, I began to paint these awkward flowers. I added my Nana's little honey pot to give the flowers some sort of counterweight. I have had the honey pot for years and am fond of it even though, like most of her ceramic objects, it bears the marks of robust family wear and tear. 

Getting to the flowers and honey pot was not so simple though. I changed the vase (the original was rectangle glass), I changed the pot (before the honey pot I tried a pottery sugar bowl), I put a cloth under the vase then removed it and I almost painted over the whole thing with Gesso several times. Now I have decided to leave it for a few months to see if it grows on me.

Pekka Kuusisto and the ACO Collective in Sydney

Pekka Kuusisto plays and directs

The lights go down and a young man steps onto the stage.
"Hallo, " he says to the audience, "my name is Pekka!"
"First of all I would like ot thank you for coming. It is always so much nicer to play for an audience!"

Pekka Kuusisto is the newly appointed Artistic Director of the ACO Collective, the younger sibling of the ACO which was previously known as ACO2 and if you hadn't yet read the program, Pekka's accent would tell you he is Finnish.

Pekka is a proponent of modern music and for the first half of the concert he had chosen seven pieces by three different living composers (Muhly, Tüür, Dessner). He had re-ordered the three movements of Erkki-Sven Tüür's Action-Passion and inserted the other compositions between them.

Not everyone would have the courage to re-order what a composer has written but it was a move that paid off: the first half was captivating. Not only did it showcase the musicianship of these up-and-coming young musicians, it was music they obviously enjoying playing.

"Oh that was just marvelous," said the elderly gentleman sitting next to me when they finished.

The Sibelius and Beethoven pieces played after the interval complemented the works chosen for the first half.

So bravo Pekka - your concert made those of us who didn't know you realise that we we have just acquired a (or another!) Finnish treasure.

Growing paintings

Picasso used to re-sign his paintings when he added to them so some of his paintings have several signatures. If I were to follow suit, my peaches painting would now have three signatures because it has grown once again.  When you paint something that seems incomplete it nags at you until you change it and the peaches painting has been doing a lot of nagging.

It started in December 2014 like this:

Peaches and glass bowl (20 x 10")

It sat quietly in the studio for a year, then suddenly earlier this month it morphed into this:

Peaches, pears and bottles. (20 x 20")

I hung it on a wall but it still wasn't very happy. It eyed the pumpkin vine growing in a vase in my studio and wanted some for itself. So now it looks like this:

Peaches, pears, bottles and pumpkin vine.
(20 x 30")

Like the vine, my paintings have a mind of their own and grow while your back is turned. I am hoping this one is now replete and happy to stay as it is. Perhaps it is time to sign it?

Garrick Ohlsson in Sydney

Garrick Ohlsson plays Mussorgsky

As I write this I am listening to Garrick Ohlsson playing Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition on the radio. I saw the concert on Monday, recorded by ABC Classic FM, and now hearing it on the radio I am aware that it sounds different without the visual effects. It is simply a different experience. Listening to non-live music is great, but it always makes me want to hear the actual live performance. Hearing a concert after seeing it live though is just a pleasure as you notice more about the audio experience that you might have missed on the evening.

Pictures at an Exhibition is a piece often played as a showpiece by virtuoso pianists as it is so difficult, not that you would have realised  that by watching Ohlsson's performance on Monday as he made it look easy.

As he finished however, one of my seat neighbours said to his companion, 'How does he do it?'

We are so lucky we live in age where technology makes it possible for performers to fly to unlikely places to give concerts and also makes it possible for us to hear them perform again and again with a press of a button.

Clear blue sunset for Valentine's

It's Valentines day - appropriate for this photo taken on the beach last night.

I wish many lovely sunsets to those exchanging red roses and to those who are not.

Peaches, pears and bottles

Peaches, pears and bottles

I am on a roll, a fruit roll ... just like this time last year. There is something about summer fruit that is art-inspiring.

This painting is an add-on. I painted some peaches last year - and half a bowl. I liked the peaches but the painting always looked incomplete, so I added another canvas above, completed the bowl and added some pears and bottles.

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.)

Happy 2016

' ... hear a little song'

'One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words.'

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice. 

#acoplayersonthebridge