Don’t Let Your Thumbnails Fall Off

Somewhere between then and now my thumbnails have fell off. Painting back at the river felt like I had come full circle – it was quite a while ago since we’d been. In between there was specatacular vistas of coastline, waterbirds and the discovery of fluro paint. There was only a few of us missing too. We talked about Barbies, Cy Twombly and Ildiko Kovacs over banana cake and home grown mandarins then got down to business.

I started with a small sketch eastward on the river toward the bridge and a man fishing at the boat ramp. Arthur Boyd’s territory. The last couple of paint trips I’ve gone back to using small thumbnails- my largest works always had this basis. I don’t remember them falling off but I know the finished work was definitely more complete, stronger.

Goodbye Mr Twombly

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were 2 artists when I went to New York that smacked me in the face.

They were Phillip Guston and Cy Twombly. Cy Twombly’s piece in the Art Gallery of New South Wales was controversial. Some hated it but I loved it and when I saw more of his work it only reinforced what I went there to look for.

Goodbye Mr Twombly. Thank you.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/

Image: From article NY Times

Cy Twombly’s “Bacchanalia: Fall (5 Days in November),” from 1977, was part of a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London that placed Twombly paintings with works by Nicolas Poussin.