I can't believe it's been two months since I returned to Sydney. We have moved house, I've finished all of the paintings for my show, and the exhibition opens tomorrow night. I intended to get personal invites off to everyone I met on my trip, but a combination of busy-ness, moving (and displacing all of my addresses), and getting the printed invitations really late from the printer (and not enough) has led to me just freezing up and not inviting anyone.
This often happens with my exhibitions. I tell people that I will contact them when I have an upcoming show, and then just before it comes I freeze up and pretend it's not going to happen. I think it must be one of those personal artist quirks. I do feel horrible though, and hope that none of the people that I stayed with on my trip take it the wrong way. I somehow feel like if I invited them and they actually came in to Sydney, that I would be inconveniencing them for going out of their way to see my paintings. I know it sounds crazy, but when all of the attention starts to focus on me I start to feel unworthy. That's most certainly not the case during the rest of the year, I just think it has something to do with all of the pressure surrounding a yearly solo exhibition. I miss being out bush. I hope you all are well.

Day 127 SaturdayAugust has come and gone in a fury of painting, and little else. The lack of posts attests to my single-minded devotion to stay at the easel and finish the body of work. I leave Mildura tomorrow and my trip is pretty much over. I have about 7 totally finished big paintings and another 6 that are close. I’m putting all of the work up so that it stands witness to the productivity of this trip. There is so much to say, but I will let the paintings do all of the talking.

Day 102 Friday This painting of a hazelnut orchard was started south of Eden while staying with a hospitable local art teacher. His dog Tyrone would accompany me down to the orchard and run around while I shot some videos and started this painting. I decided to put him in running, as a counter to the bent form of the man shovelling hazelnuts into a wheelbarrow. This painting lacks the unity of the some of the other canvases which contain rows of homogonous trees, but makes up for it in its movement and spatial qualities.

Day 101 Thursday
I worked on this big painting for about a week before I had my rest, and used my downtime to contemplate where to take it. With nothing in the immediate foreground, and a relief-like horizontal composition, I decided to extend the branches of the persimmon trees to the top of the canvas to hold everything together. Also because of the relief-like composition, the scale of the branches, fruit and interstices of background coming through the branches are all of a similar modularity which helps the brushstrokes form a random pattern in light and shade. I’m titling this one ‘the nightingale brothers’ after the name of the company that owns the orchard, and that name, plus ‘Wandiligong’ the locality can be seen stencilled on the tub to the right.

Day 99 Tuesday
With the ball rolling from the last canvas, and a palette loaded with buttery colours I plunged into this next canvas. The video I was referencing for this composition was shot in a different persimmon orchard south of Araluen, NSW. I pumped up the saturation in the gum trees in the background, as I dread reaching for the greys that would accurately describe their real colour. Again the picker entered from the left, activating the orchard and providing a visual balance to the repoussoir on the right. It’s exciting painting all day long, getting out of bed and opening the bay doors to the morning sun and painting all day until I look outside to see the indigo evening settling down, promptly closing those same doors to paint into the night. I’ve got a bunch of audio tapes to keep me going and am currently really enjoying painting to Annie Hawes’ “Extra Virgin”.

Day 98 Monday
After a little over two weeks in the heart of the dark Victorian winter I am back at the easel working furiously on the big paintings. The reasons for my respite from painting are many and should have been more foreseeable, but somehow, weren’t. As the large amount of money I had saved for this trip petered out, I found myself engaged as the local chalk busker in the town centre, doing drawings for some gold coins in my hat. The second major factor was the increasing cold weather and short daylight hours to warm the jam factory. Factor 1 had limited my kerosene ration, and I began timing my trip to the aquatic centre to an hour before they closed to warm myself in the spa and sauna before returning to the studio for a couple of final hours of painting. The third reason was that Moz came out to visit me for a week. I did absolutely no painting during this week and we spent our time on the banks of the Murray in the warm sun, drinking sparkling wine and me playing guitar while Moz wove a reed dillybag out of the long grass growing from the riverbank. After she left and a couple of painting sales later, I have kerosene and renewed vigour towards completing this body of work. I decided to begin on a completely fresh big canvas, and after two days of non-stop painting I’m putting it up for view. I realized a few things about my painting process that I seemed to have forgotten these past few weeks: I work best attacking the painting all in one go, and the on and off again process I had been employing here was keeping the painting from taking on any strong direction. When I began this one, I mixed up copious amounts of half a dozen colours I had chosen for the colour scheme and worked it up both in tone and texture until I thought I had it balanced. The bird and picker entered towards the end and took their places quite naturally. I’m enjoying thoughts about the struggle between the birds and humans in their race to denude the trees of their ripe fruit. Sometimes it carries strong masculine overtones…