SALE artist words as paint FOREST series

Lichen 2025 Aaqus innovation 82 x 102 cm


Blush is a tree painting in the Nantasenhai Forest series. I first climbed the mountain Nantasenhai* in 1987, and I would have walked past this tree. But the tree would have been a seed in the ground and I didn't see it then. Yet all the seed's Eucalyptus DNA was eventually going to produce these wonderful pink pigments that stain the white trunks of this species, after the occasional rain. The large Blush tree is, in fact, propbably of an age that means it was a tall sapling when I walked past it, forty years ago. I didn't see the tree for the forest then. As eucalyptus trees grow and expand their trunks, they shed their outer bark and then regrow it. As Chinese literature says, "If the old doesn't go, the new doesn't arrive". (This short poem can be painted in calligraphy). When the Blush tree's outer bark dries out, it gradually peels off the tree. Then the colours in the bark powder and "dust" the white surface of the living tree trunk. These natural powder pigments come in browns, purples, yellows, oranges, pinks and reds. When the occasional rain comes in this dry micro-climate, the white eucalypts are washed with natural, precious watercolours.

Blush is painted with most of the Aaqus painting innovations: South East Asian bakik techniques separate out the design elements; an East Asian "scroll" aesthetic lays out the trunk and forest floor elements; watercolour techniques are applied directly to raw textile-as-artwork, and this is integrated with Western New York School abstract expressionist and Zen painterly techniques.

Blush's workflow emerged from meditation and from surrealist art-dreaming. To stay in conscious control, I made a technical sketch plan of Blush's many construction steps. In seeking to discipline the style's unconscious brushstrokes in the workflow, I follow in the footsteps of Australian pioneer artists Fairweather, Upward, and Whiteley . They also emersed themselves in Zen Buddhism in order to develop their Australian and international painting styles and competency.

Within my style, Blush continues to innovate and take risks. Recently, in a few very sunny forest paintings, I have tried tropic, not temperate, textile on which to paint this temperate location. Moreover, Blush is painted out to the edge of the textile. This is unusual because typical Aaqus paintings have a painted frame as part of the design. Blush forgoes the usual painted frame and makes its own visual statement.

(* Nan ta sen hai can be read as "Southern Tasmania wilderness sea" or "Direction pagoda obscure mind". It's the same four characters in painted poetry calligraphy. It names the real place Blush emerges from, and it suggests some states of mind.)


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