Hickey Brothers Fish Market- Baileys Harbor WI
There has been a fair amount of activity in the studio this month, with painting on a nearly daily basis, if I could get through the hip deep snow, Steve was able to blow it clear for me, and I spent the days unwrapping and flattening the rolls of work Steve brought back from Australia. It was work accumulated and left there for years, stored in our car, in a shed, untouched and unseen for a long time, and I forgot I had painted some of the sultry studies of rain forest views. Australiana has been on my mind, but I have also been focusing on finishing up a few pieces started here last summer and fall.
The red building in the top painting is on property owned by Hickey family, who have a commercial fishing business. I don't know much about the history of this place but the old building and array of ropes, boat accessories and fishing net supplies attracted me, as well as hundreds of other artists I am certain, through the decades they have been in business. This painting was started on site then photographed and finished in the studio over the winter months.
Bromeliad Pathway 2005-06?
Probably done in 2005, water soluble oil on paper, View of the path and hilltop near our cabin-
With apologies for the flash glare here, this is a foggy view of our rain forest in Gooonengerry New South Wales, the flora and fauna was dominant in my daily routine, we lived there for each southern summer season, for nearly a decade before selling it. The place changed my life and my perspective. I was amazed at the colors when I unwrapped these studies. Its good to have them back. I savor the time spent there, and am able to travel back to the moment at which I stood there, leeches inside my socks, the spectre of a brown snake in the bushes, and kookaburra, currawong and tiny fairy wrens surrounded me. These painted sketches on canvas paper serve as a vehicle for my life's memories.
Watercolor pencil studies that did get rained on, done from the porch annex on our caravan, 2007
Staghorn Pathway- Goonengerry NSW 2007(?)
Our Staghorn lined path into the rain forest, which is really mostly eucalypt trees, it is called a dry littoral rain forest, there are some species of rain forest tree there, but the lantana and camphor laurel tend to take over, non native invasives sucking up the water, but our forest had staghorns and orchids and Davidson's Plum and all manner of bromeliads, huge and small. There was always something blooming in there. We would awake to the thump of a wallaby moving up the path, and go to sleep at night often with the sound of a male koala, bellowing away for a female to accept him.
It is my hope to remount these paintings and studies, and sometime in the late summer, will host a small exhibition of the work, presented as a cohesive body of work, Australiana
