Pyrmont Art Prize

The first Saturday in May is the Pyrmont Art Prize. They have a one-day exhibition of all  the paintings in Union Square in Pyrmont. It is a good one to enter, because for the entry fee you get your canvas as well,  so everyone is painting the same size. You can paint whatever you like. So I’m entering – hoping to sell, not to win. And my painting is priced to sell, because with all this testing of new products my house is filling up with paintings.

I couldn’t find the dates for delivery on the web, so I emailed the Pyrmont Village website. They asked me if they could write me up on their site -  asked me to fill a questionnaire and asked me also to send some images. Here’s a link. For some reason there have been some problems with this link, so I’ve now put the painting in this post, butyou can  read the article at the link.

New Dry Medium painting at the Easter Show

On Sunday I was demonstrating on the Matisse Derivan stand at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. I painted this new Cubist painting with the new Dry Mediums. I got this idea from a Cubist painting of a coffee pot in a great book I have called 200 Projects to Strengthen Your Art Skills: For Aspiring Art Students (Aspire) It is a great book with so many unusual ideas in it, and I particularly love the colours.  So, though you can’t see in this small image, I collaged the canvas with torn strips of the Sydney Morning Herald, then painted over them with Matisse Matt Gel Medium MM30 and a little Yellow Oxide to strengthen the newsprint.  Then I did the drawing (from some thumbnails I’d done in my sketchbook.  After that I put on the dry mediums. The pot and coffee cup are mostly the different grades of sand, the pumice and the mica flakes. In the background I made thin cube -like shapes, some  from Microspheres and  some from Wollastonite. These are relatively transparent and allowed the text on the newsprint to show through. Then I painted it at the show.

World Wide Sketchcrawl Cockatoo Island

Saturday was the 22nd Word-Wide Sketchcrawl (my 3rd). It was the perfect day for going to Cockatoo Island – not too hot, not too cold. Cockatoo Island is a large island in Sydney Harbour. It is an old shipyard with amazing machinery and old buildings. Everything is rusted and distressed and there were a lot of photo opportunities. There were eight of us. We caught the 10 am ferry out there, and my friend and I were last to leave catching the 3.15 ferry back.

There is a lower and upper area to the island, with the dock facilities being on the lower part (of course). There were many shapes of these old cranes, and one of the sketchcrawlers drew them in a way that each had their own personality. Fantastic. I wish I could do that.

It is always interesting to meet the other Sketchcrawlers and I enjoyed looking at everyone’s work over lunch at the Muster Station. I always learn something – every time. This time I learnt that there is free Life Drawing at the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown on a Monday – maybe 15 minutes walk from my house.

Cockatoo Island is easy to get to – once that you’ve been once. I’m sure I’ll go again. I took many photos, though the light was not great for photography. Maybe I’ll go out early and get some images with long shadows.

Where are my drawings? They’re in the preview. I’ll try again later – maybe there’s a glitch.