Painting of a dead tree in the bush

I have just finished this painting today.    It is fairly large on canvas and the idea was to paint it in the style of Michael Shannon, an Australian painter whose work is generally loose, often begun with scribble.  Most of the foliage was put on with a sponge.  A palette knife was used for some white areas.  It was finished with glazing to delineate the warm and cool areas.

Portrait in pastel

I have finally finished  the soft pastel portrait I began in Lyn Diefenbach's class in January.  I chose to work from a photo I took of an old Indonesian woman many years ago in the Lesser Sunda Islands. I think her face has lots of character and her hair is more blond than grey, a feature of old age.

Landscape Drawings and Painting

This semester I am doing another painting course (through the Centre for Continuing Education at ANU)  with Michael Winters, a well-known Canberra artist.  He always challenges me to push boundaries and sometimes attempt work to which I don't feel an immediate attraction.  The course is

Landscape Painting - Shape, Form Colour and Texture

We are looking at the work of three artists in this course - Dorrit Black (Australian), Michael Shannon (Australian) and Andre Derain (European).

We have just finished doing work with the influence of Dorrit Black, an Australian painter and printmaker.  We were interested in form and shape with landscapes of rolling hills with the shading of colours and tones.  I really love her work as it pushes realism into graphic and more simple forms.

I took several photos of the Canberra Arboretum with its hills and the artworks are based on these.

The first was a black and white drawing using a 2B graphite pencil.  The Margaret Whitlam Pavillion at the Arboretum was a dominant contrasting feature.

I then did another picture in black and white with a charcoal pencil showing the graphic nature of the scene.  The Telstra Tower in Canberra raises above the background hills.

The third black and white work was done in acrylic paint and was an enlarged section of a drawing.  I made at attempt at some vertical lines to show the cubist influence on Dorrit's work when she was in Europe.

Finally a canvas was used with acrylic colour to show shape and form in the landscape. I like the colours and tones in this painting.

Photobook on my Africa Overland trip

This is my latest photo book on my Overland trip through Africa in 1974-75.  Click on the arrow  and it should take you to the Blurb Bookstore where my books are available for viewing and for sale.  Hope you enjoy it.

This book has 649 photos and 240 pages with slides scanned and text gleaned from the photos and my diary.  It was an amazing adventure which I'm glad I did when in my early thirties.

AFRICA OVERLAND by Ruth Lathlean
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