Watercolour-collage 'Sunset garden'

I made the watercolours for ‘Sunset garden’ on Saturday during the Eastern Suburbs Art Group painting session organised for the afternoon. It was fun to sit around inside making little paintings of the dark green colocasia leaves, the reddish-black stems, and the white pebbles of the light well. 

There were three of us there and we all had different solutions to the problem of representation, a topical issue as on the day there was an election in Victoria. Figurative art never seems to go away though for a while there it seemed that high art had completely abandoned figuration – there’s an exhibition on at Chau Chak Wing Museum at the moment of 70s and 80 abstract art – but artists in 2022 have it available if they feel inclined to work out ways to extract the abstract from actual views of the world.

I went to see a show on at Damien Minton’s little gallery in Waterloo where Sidney Teodoruk’s lovely paintings – some oils and others collages combining cut-up paintings, words, and colours – inspired me to continue a trend in my own work that’d started a bit earlier when I was making colour-field paintings and sticking collage on top.

Yesterday I took this idea further by combining it with the figurative play of the Colocasia paintings, helped by my iPhone where I’d been noting down words with six letters. I chose “sunset” and “garden” then decided what source material to use for the collage. 

As usual I didn’t think too much about this part of the exercise though I’d already decided to use a waste paramontage that features a poem written on 11 March, and 15, 23 and 26 September 2021. The Bondi photos were taken on 9 March 2008 just before a major episode that I did survive and the poem features an historical subject, the idea that major political centres often get established on waterways, I was thinking when writing the poem of how the Vikings settled beaches then towns grew up around the resulting entrepots.

The reason why the paramontage was waste is because it’d been printed at the wrong size. I started making paramontages in April and got the grid-form ones done early in the process, the type-6 paramontages eventually being rejected in favour of works with different-sized photos in them. This type 6 is titled ‘Oswald eats a peach’ and it has a poem that goes like this.

Archers and melons make suitable sport

for these ambitious sons, fixing to sing.

A model once formed is a new resort

from the loathing and fear twisting the ring 

as immigrants fit our linguistic rules

and letters in books that land on the beach

infest our guts so that His very stools

nourish crops nourishing men within reach. 

Strict recitative fumbles a button

while priests magnificent with verbal tools

inscribe His reluctant fiat upon

the warbands scrappy as next-morning fools. 

When streets are laid out it becomes a port 

once a warrior’s seat – becomes a court.

Here is the set of watercolours and I’ve decided to get them framed when I go to Richmond for that purpose on Wednesday.