Due to school holidays, travel and other family routine I managed to miss a couple of weeks of my trail notes! Whoops! I’m here again now though and have a LOT to catch up on. In the last two weeks I have traveled with a rent pickup from this place flexfleetrental.com from Cairns to Sydney and has been a very comfortable trip using this type of car, I attended ANZAC day events, sat through some very bad storms and watched as some awful things have unfolded around the world. Still, painting has happened and art galleries were visited and not to mention the start of a new kids art class at our church.
While I was away my lovely hubby went into the Sydney Royal Showgrounds and picked up my poultry art entries including my painting ‘Mr Gander’ and its red ribbon. These now hang in my studio together however three of the five paintings I entered are for sale. They come fully framed with hanging attachments on the back. Contact me if you are interested in purchasing any of these. Here’s a reminder:
While I was visiting Cairns the theme for the 52 week illustration challenge was ‘Vietnam’. Considering I have never been there and my main contact was growing up with Vietnamese refugees, I decided to play it safe and paint tropical fruit. Being in Cairns at the time was an advantage so we popped down to Rusty’s markets one Sunday after church and purchased a bunch of tropical fruit. Unfortunately it wasn’t dragon fruit season so there was none of that but there was mangosteen and rambutan which was new for me. This was my still life setup:
The bananas are even different being monkey bananas. As soon as I setup to paint I had my nephew and daughter join me. Considering how difficult this was to paint, I was impressed that they both had a good go at drawing it!
The end result was not too bad, I was happy with it I think.
This image is now available on all manner of products in my RedBubble store here.
The next topic (last week) was ‘Structure’ so I used my most recent oil painting which I had done to work in with that theme anyway (but hadn’t decided whether to use it) which was this one:
While I was in Cairns my brother took me out gallery visiting one day (which was very nice of him) and we visited the Cairns Regional Art Gallery. They currently have an excellent photographic exhibition on called ‘EVER PRESENT PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY COLLECTION 1850-1975‘. This was excellent as there was work from Max Dupain, Weegee and many others. My brother likes photography so this was great for both of us. We also enjoyed their other current exhibit ‘STRING THEORY: FOCUS ON CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ART‘.
Next we went over to the Tanks Art Centre which is located next to my favourite place in the world, the Cairns Botanical Gardens. The Cairns Art Society was holding their annual exhibition called ‘Artists of the North 2015’. We really enjoyed seeing local work and I loved the tropical influence that ran throughout.
I actually have more to note but I think I will write a separate post as this one is already getting to be too long!
“The road goes ever on and on”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Amanda
