About 10 years ago I revived my artistic practise. I chose oil pastels as my media, they are very like the oil based crayons we used as children. I've been interested in exploring how far I could take the tools we were offered as children - crayons (oil pastels), set triangles and circles, origami and toys for example. With my oil pastel work I developed a style of simple line drawing coloured using a method of rubbing back the applied colour to produce a staining on the board, building up layers of very thin coats of colour. Do your remember shading the coastlines on maps rubbing the pencil scraping in with a small piece of torn paper? My method is a bit like that only with a thin piece of dish cloth wound around my finger like a thick band-aid. This work culminated in a series of large symbolic paintings which are my version of the major Arcana of the Tarot. I completed about 10 paintings and still have the cartoons for a few more. However, as I became more involved in the Brisbane art scene my interest moved to my work with toys so I put these large paintings away, realising that their style was not "marketable" - this was in 2004.
Four years later, I've journeyed further into the realm of the Spirit and have become more adept in the symbolic language the human psyche uses to communicate its inner reality. I'm thankful for these paintings and their lack of marketability, it has kept them safe for me until the time I would need them - when I could handle and differentiate parts of myself symbolically. Now I see them as more than a pure hope or forecast but instructive of living principles in my own voice - my individual potential.
Jung writes that one can only become that which one has the potential to be.
The painting above is called The Chariot. (click the picture for a larger image)
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