Arnhemland Water Sun Workshop I and II

Mount Borradaile, August 2007 and May 26-30 2008

See the video here

Arnhemland Sun Water I and II

These 4 day workshops run by Basil Hall, from Basil Hall editions in Darwin and myself, brought together a diverse group of artists from all around Australia and overseas in a unique and remote location. Some of the participants were novices, others were very experienced but all moved outside their conventional comfort zones in all sorts of ways to make canvases and prints. There was an impressive exhibition of work at the end of the 4 days revealing just how focussed and productive the artists had been.

After and welcome from Charlie Mangulta, a Traditional Owner for Awunbarna, Mount Borradaile, we were introduced to the colours which signify land; red ochre, sun, yellow, oxides, water: white kaolin and black, in traditional top end Aboriginal art. Our camp host, Max Davidson and Charlie, showed us how to grind the oxides on a grindstone and the orchids growing on a tree, used as a binder for the pigment. We then piled into troop carriers and headed out for our first afternoon of visiting rock art sites and painting in nearby locations. We followed this pattern for the rest of the week.

We painted 4 canvases 50 x 50 cms in a grid. I wanted the artist to be bold and avoid fiddly mark making, so the large size`was challenging for some of them.I grounded the canvases when I arrived with a yellow ochre, acrylic binder and water ground.

We worked directly onto that with red ochre wash to block in the middle tones. leaving plenty of ground as highlight. Our dark tone for the next colour was once again a ruddle or decomposing haematite, in this instance from Mt Newman. These warm colours applied tonally, help infuse the painting with the warmth, seen in the Australian landscape. we then worked more middle tones in blues, greens, yellows with some highlights of purple for waterlilies and so on. Some artists responded strongly to this complementary colour and used it also in their multiple colour prints which they made with Basil Hall in alternating printmaking/ painting sessions.

The painters basically used found and bought pigments mixed with acrylic binder and water in a quasi tempera/ watercolour technique. This allows semi opaque high key colours to be applied over darker warm underpainting. Most artists worked on coated zinc plates in the landscape, sometimes while paint was drying. Scratching in a linear manner with a buren helps focus the eye on detail, specifically that which can be defined by line and then when the printing steps start, by tone as well, all every useful adjuncts to the painterly process. A few intractable painters like myself simply brushed straight onto their plates freely with sugar lift, enjoying the more painterly side of printmaking but nonetheless learning from the tonal discipline.

I encouraged the artists in their 4 panel works to find ways of linking the the canvases visually with each other, either by a similar size of object in the picture plane or similar horizon line or vantage point. Our experience of landscape is usually fragmented and often constructed as little snapshots or visual stories and this way of assembling an image seemed appropriate to the vast and complex landscape of Arnhemland. All the artists' works were staggeringly individual of course but I felt everyone learnt that they could handle the sheer mechanics of how to paint canvases in the landscape. They also learnt the value of colours and pigments in the Australian context where synthetic European green and blues and reds, look so wrong.