Blue Turtle will be 61cm x 46cm, Acrylic mediums on  a commercially made canvas.

Blue Turtle is another attempt to get deeper into the cave painting series. “Purple Patches among Flowers” will be a major influence on this painting. The surfaces on the Patches painting almost worked and were coming alive before I worked back into the surface and exposed the odd colored under-painting.

The underpainting in this work is busier than the preceding. Paint and impasto medium have been used to give the impression that there might be images of earlier work among the textures. The viewer has been given the components to imagine hunters, animals and even Chinese characters. Real cave and rock paintings are often overlaid onto generation of earlier works and this is one of the things I find so compelling. I am not copying this idea however. I am being inspired from it and interpreting it with our new materials and on new surfaces.

I will write an essay on the all the philosophy and reasoning behind my attraction to those rock and cave and pre-historic art generas as well as placing it in its historical context and extending it inro its local presence… Whatever that means

I have dropped the idea of the leaping horse for “Hunting Party” I need a larger canvas to make the leaping horse effective. Thinking about it. Perhaps an oxide turtle as the over-painting and they become the turtle set. If the turtles look like there are things I can learn from making more and arent a waste of canvas I might make a set.

Parts of today were spent researching various tribal and native art turtles as well as local turtle varieties. A generic turtle is not a way to show that thought and care was applied to the idea.

Also gluing the small practice paintings for the big triple canvas “Insomnia” into my visual journal. The story of the finished painting is in the Painting Journal web site which links of the blog roll to the right. There were a half-dozen works on cardboard 45cm x 20cm.

I hated them when I first did the series but after more than ten years I can see beauty in them. They have been soaked when my storage shed caught fire, crapped on by possums, chewed by silverfish and left in a car port for years. They are tough enough to survive although they are considerably worse for wear.

They were a good effort. Half a dozen small paintings just to test the concept for another one. I need to get somewhere back towards that kind of effort although it will certainly tax my strength these days

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