Where in the world is Georgette?

…She’s back in New Zealand.

My apologies for the radio silence from me all year. 2019 has started off with a bang!

It started with our engagement at the end of last year. Mark proposed at our favourite sailing spot - Charteris Bay in Lyttelton Harbour. Down by the waters edge at the boat ramp, the love of my life asked me to marry him, and of course I said YES! This made for an extra happy New Years Eve!

We wanted to celebrate our engagement with family and friends at our home, but needed to do alterations to our deck first. There’s nothing like a deadline to get things done! So all of January saw us demolishing and completely re-building half of the deck! The party was on a perfect Summer’s day so everyone got to enjoy our handiwork.

Mark and I building the deck.

Mark and I at our engagement party standing on the deck.

Japan adventures

In March we flew to Japan for 2 1/2 weeks of adventure, culture, history and craziness. Highlights included: tree skiing at Kiroro ( in Hokkaido), a cooking lesson in Osaka, singing Karaoke with the locals till 3am, dressing up in a kimono in Kyoto, and the madness of the robot restaurant in Tokyo.

If you are visiting Japan I highly recommend the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and teamLab Borderless Tokyo (Digital Art Museum) - this exhibition was full of colourful interactive projections, lights, lanterns and fun. An exhibition you can easily get lost in!

While in Japan I decided to treat myself with a visit to Pigment - the most stunning, well designed art store I have ever seen. The Japanese have an effortlessly elegant approach of presentation, and Pigment was no exception. I treated myself to some beautiful traditional sumi brushes, bamboo paper and a gold leaf kit. I am looking forward to trying these out!

What’s on the easel?

I have been busy working on the Nasbey landscape oil painting. I am now in the final stages. My list of things left to do is getting smaller and smaller which makes it very exciting. These final details are sometimes subtle and the colour is critical to get right. Therefore I can no longer paint at night as the fake light plays with the colours. So I have a policy to only paint during daylight hours, which means I have to wait to the weekends. I am looking forward to the Easter break to get some day light hours on the piece. Here is it now on the easel. Not far to go! Stay tuned. Thanks for stopping by.

Working in progress, Naseby oil painting, 1620x760mm.

---

Landscape Oil Painting - Mt Aspiring

This painting was such a thrill to create. I worked from a photograph I took from a helicopter of Mt Aspiring, New Zealand. How lucky I felt to see this magnificent mountain up close! 

Watch this artwork come together from sketch through to the final result.

To read more about this painting see an earlier post here.

Mt Aspiring, 2017, Oil on canvas, 700 x 400mm , (27.5 in x 15.7 in)

---

Painting Time Lapse - The entire process

Wahoo!! My first ever time lapse of the entire painting process!! I've learned so much and made so many mistakes along the way from filming to editing and spent waay to long selecting the 'right song' but here it is.

I wanted to show the whole process from prepping the board right through signing it off. Still getting the hang of filming there were some mishaps along the way. I missed most of the sketching as I hadn't properly hit record and I took 20 minutes of blurry film as I hadn't focused the scene.

Compressing many hours of film down to 1 minute is quite the task. What I found super interesting while editing was that well over half the time the brush is not on the canvas. I didn't calculate the percentage but it was rather high. There is a lot of thinking that happens when painting, always planning your next move, and as you know there is no handy undo button.

---

Making art while making art

It's amazing that you can be making art without even realising it. I looked down at my painting cloth yesterday and just loved the overlapping colours. How often do we stop to reflect on the colours we have mixed on their own, as these are the foundation on which the painting is built. This cloth is the result of years of use. I really must get a new cloth as it is hard to find a clean spot. This can be quite frustrating at times but I love the way it looks. It tells a story of the paintings I have created over the last few years. Some of these colours are never seen in the final paintings and as time goes on the colour of the cloth itself is slowly disappearing.

Close-up on my painting cloth.

---

Visiting family and a painting

There is something really nice about seeing a painting again after some years. I got to see this gem again on a recent trip to the States to visit my sister, her husband and my new niece. I had painted this as a wedding gift for them. My brother-in-law took this panorama of Yosemite as I hadn't been there. The painting spanned over a year, taking some 130 hours. I started the painting in California and finished it back in NZ before the painting was eventually settled back in California. It's a well travelled painting! Years later I visited Yosemite at that very spot and it was the most surreal feeling. It was like walking into my painting.

Yosemite, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 1016mm x 609mm (40 in x 24 in)

---

Mt Aspiring - Work in progress

I am currently working on a landscape of Mt Aspiring, New Zealand. I took this photo from a helicopter as we were crossing the Southern Alps. My brother-in-law took my sister, partner and I on a trip in 2014 and I still cherish the memory of that trip, even though, I was a bit scared of the helicopter wobbling about in what was actually a very still day (thank fully). I am happy with progress and I will show the finished piece soon.

View fullsize

Work in progress on Mt Aspiring, Oil on canvas.

---