Australian Paintings 2007–10

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There is also a page of chiaroscuro (black-white) drawings from the same period

Boreen Point for Jeff (a commission)
60 x 60 cm. (24 inches square) oil on canvas

Boreen Point is a community on a lake near Noosa Heads on the Queensland coast. It carries an air of utter tranquillity and the colours and heat of summer. There are many views through layers of eucalypts to the lakeshore and beyond. The blue in the original is deeper, less cyan, than in this reproduction, the light on the eucalypts and the distant shore keyed higher.

North Queensland Oil on Board (50 x 40 cm, 20 x 16 inches) A painting, like the one of the Outback below, that attempts to roll together all the impressions of travelling in Australia's tropical north.  The curious northern architecture of houses on stumps (that is, stilts), sprawling pubs with shaded verandahs, rusting iron roofs, sluggish rivers lined with mangroves, plantations in green strips that might be bananas but more likely are sugar cane, cane mills and narrow-gauge cane railways, palm trees, white sand beaches and, of course, caravan parks like the ones we stayed in on the Great Campervan Trip. Like many of the pictures I'm now painting, I've dispensed with single-point perspective here and am taking a much freer view of the arrangement and scale of objects in the landscape – freer, at least, than what I normally do when I'm out with the sketchbook and "illustrating" things.

Outback Approximately
6 oil panels,  total size approx. 36 x 42 inches (91 x  107 cm), 2010

An attempt to roll the entire experience of travelling through the central Australian desert into one image.  As in many Aboriginal "desert school" paintings, a waterhole is the focus; spinifex and other low shrubs and bunch-grasses speckle the landscape, as in Aboriginal dot paintings; the pumpkin-coloured sand dunes, the yellows, greens and blues of the vegetation, the rock faces quite orange-coloured in the foreground but fading quickly to red with purple shadows in the distance due to a trick of light; the land forms ribbed and arched – the "Caterpillar Dreaming" of the MacDonnell Ranges near Alice Springs; dirt tracks meandering like snakes between the rocky outcrops; unlike in Aboriginal paintings which are painted flat like maps, an evocation of the vastness and bleakness of the desert, the isolation and vulnerability a traveller feels and the immense sense of relief of coming upon a waterhole in a gorge; and finally, as in a William Robinson landscape, the idea that the water is actually a hole looking through to the sky.

Cascade Street from the top of the hill, oil on board, Winter 2009
(...our view on the way to our Katoomba home from 2007-9)

Mist Rising in the Kedumba Gully, 2009, oil on canvas, diptych,  61 x 154 cm,  24 x 60 inches This looks back to the first painting I did here in 2007, based on the view that we had from the back window in Katoomba from 2007-9.

Sheep on hillside 2009 Oil on board 37.5 x 27 cm 15 x 10 3/4 inches

Beach at Nambucca, oil on board, painted 2009: 62 x 41 cm. Can't resist those ocean colours.... Summer Storm, 2009, oil on board,  37.5  27 cm. Based on a little shack on the roadside on the way to Hill End.

Recent (2008) sketchbook watercolours

As the months have gone by here and we've travelled around the countryside, I've spent some time on the "long paddock" – that is, the roadsides – with my sketchbook and watercolours, doing much the same sort of thing as I did for so many years in Canada and elsewhere in the world (recorded in the travel section of this website). There is always in the back of my mind the idea of doing in Australia a sort of book and painting project like Vanishing British Columbia or my "Canada" book. It is such an interesting human/cultural landscape, but the complexities of researching, let alone the expense of travelling, have so far kept me close to home. But the watercolours below provide an inkling of what I would find if I really went out there on the road.... Left: the path to the beach at Catherine Hill Bay

(Think of the little black dots in the distant water as body surfers.) Catherine Hill Bay is a former mining town on the New South Wales coast south of the big industrial city of Newcastle. Its coastline is a natural conservation area, with ruins of the coal-loading works concentrated on the headland in the distance (above). The town itself is several streets of 19th century weatherboard cottages, with a pub in the middle (of course). All of it was supposedly protected by State heritage legislation, but the Labour government amended the Planning Act in 2008 to allow development in areas it deemed significant to the public interest; ergo, the mining company, which owns a lot of land in the vicinity, has successfully lobbied for rezonings for a new resort/residential community that would completely dwarf the existing town and threaten the natural landscape.... The painting above went into my book Here & Gone.

Surf fisherman at Mona Vale Beach near Sydney, also in my book Here & Gone.

In addition to the stations at each town in the mountains (nearly 20 of them) and the big hotels at Medlow Bath and in Katoomba (the Carrington), there are other historic relics of the railway era.  There are still three surviving gatekeepers' cottages along the tracks, each with a date of 1867 or 1868 carved in stone on their front gables. They are tiny cottages, built of sandstone with classic Victorian punched fascia boards. The one on the right is at Mount Victoria. The one above is at Medlow Bath, a few hundred metres from the Hydro Majestic. Below: a brush drawing I did in 2001 of the tiny Medlow Bath railway station.

Closer to home, it's hard not to paint the distinctive mountain cottages, usually weatherboard (horizontal drop siding) but sometimes sandstone, most of them a century or so old, that line Katoomba's hilly streets. These two little daubs are of cottages on Cascade Street, within a few minutes' walk of home.

Oils from 2007

Tourist Map of Lue Oil on canvas 91 x 61 cm 36 x 24 inches The first of a series of pictures inspired by Lue, a dot on the map near Mudgee. DESTROYED, I THINK

Distant Rain Oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm 20 x 16 inches .... talking with the guy who was laying tiles on our front porch. He would have been the 4th generation of his family to farm a piece of property out west near Wagga Wagga, but he didn't like the uncertainty and left the country to get a trade. His parents had been watching thunderstorms drop life-giving rain, but randomly across the landscape, for years. This year they threw all their savings into a last-ditch attempt to get a profitable crop, but the lack of rain for the past few months meant the grain would only be usable as hay. So they cut it. As it lay in the field, it began to rain, ruining it.

Climate Change #1 Oil on canvas 76 x 21 cm (30 x 24 inches) This is a fantasy based on some of the TV pictures of flooding over the past several months, first in Bangladesh, later in the Hunter Valley.  I was both fascinated and appalled by the way floodwaters beautified the landscape, reducing the randomness of the human and natural landscape to a flat pattern. DESTROYED

Songlines for Sheep August, 2007 Oil on canvas 76 x 50 cm (30 x 20 inches) Another map-like long high view. Sheep must have songlines too,  and like the Aboriginal ones from the Dreamtime (see, for example, the wikipedia entry) the pathways have a lot to do with finding water. Based on a sketch from the roadside on the road to Oberon in the western part of the Blue Mountains. SOLD

Drought Town, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches (46 x 92 cm.) A fantasy based on our trip through the dry wheat belt of New South Wales in May.

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Artwork and text ©Michael Kluckner 2007-9

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