"Like fornication, travel is exciting but not interesting"--attributed to Malcolm Muggeridge
A partial record of 3 months, October through January, spent mainly in Sydney. The record of the trip started out as an extended "blog," but I decided in 2004 to edit it down and rescan the best of the images, partly because I went back to the sketchbook in order to repaint some of them in oils. For me as a painter, the value of the trip was in spending so much time in an oil-painters' country, where the light and the colours really lend themselves to media other than watercolour.
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Late October: Walked across the Harbour Bridge from the tiny apartment we had rented on Kurraba Road in Neutral Bay, to Observatory Point (the park in front of the National Trust headquarters) and painted the famous bridge looking across the Rocks toward the North Shore. |
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Early November: Our daughter Sarah Jane's backyard in Petersham, with Hill's Hoist and laundry, and baked brown grass, at dusk on a warm spring evening.
Gunther, Sarah Jane's very large cat |
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November: Two images near Lavender Bay, one of the exquisite little coves on the Lower North Shore, directly across the harbour from Sydney's downtown. The top one is a park just above the bay with a trail that winds down to the water; the house on the left, with a white tower barely visible past the palm tree, belonged to the artist Brett Whiteley who "topped himself," I was told (he committed suicide--a good career move for any artist). The image on the left from the sketchbook is of a steep pathway and set of stairs down to Lavender Bay, passing a National Trust-classified Victorian house from the 1880s. The McMahon's Point ferry wharf is in the middle distance.
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November: We spent a couple of weeks in the country, most notably at a house in the remote Mount Wilson part of the Blue Mountains belonging to Christine's stepbrother. Along its winding driveway were tree ferns and several stringy-bark eucalypts, their pale trunks criss-crossed by the blue shadows of the long strings of bark. Eucalypts are such messy trees, leaving a huge pile of bark and leaves on the ground throughout the year and providing fuel for the bushfires that regularly ravage the area. |
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November: Blue Mountains landscape (west of Sydney)--Govett's Leap, for those familiar with their Aussie landmarks. Every square inch clothed in grey-green eucalypts, except for the sheer rock faces. The blue of the Blue Mountains, which tints the shadows and "mists" the distant views, is apparently caused by the action of sunlight on the eucalyptus oils (a sort of New World sfumato). These are the Australian landscape colours, which are both dull and bright at the same time, that initially thwarted European-trained painters in the colonial period. Scenes like this really look best in oils, which can communicate the thick intensity of the light. |
Artwork copright 2001/2002 M. Kluckner
