Wild Poppy (2017)
A defiant poppy stands against a thicket of ivy while a dramatic misty lake and mountain looms in the background. We could be in the Australian Alps – a survivor of a long lost homestead against one of our alpine lakes.
Once more this picture combines a very Baroque flower – using all the techniques I learned at the Florence Academy of Art to make my pictures glow – with the dramatic landscape and sky that is so characteristic of my pastel works, but this time on a very large scale in oil.
On a technical note, I use Old Holland oils which are produced in exactly the same way that they were in Rembrandt’s time – hand ground pigments with a minimum of filler. We know that these will be colourfast for up to 500 years! They are wonderful paints – but expensive. A large tube (and you get through them quite fast when you are working on this scale) costs around $200. But I think they are worth every cent.
