Tag Archives: Tasmania landscape

Painting on the floor

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My studio, my house, my life is a little all over/ on top of the place at the moment. I have to sort through things and straighten things out but have no time. When I do get time I make work – I wasn’t prioritizing it at certain points this year and I can’t have that.

I’m an artist, no one will make that time happen but me.

I’ve been meaning to paint this year and it had not happened. I stopped making excuses last week – stopped worrying about if it would be good or not and went up to my studio and bloody painted and it was liberating.
I did it on the floor as all desk space is currently occupied – some with works on paper in developement but mostly just covered in books and paper and gosh knows what else.
Not ideal, as my bum and back ache and there’s a lot of cat hair up there – but it’ll do. I’ll paint and then when I have the time, I’ll tidy.

Priority. Paint.

I started this one in Tasmania, just as a study of texture and colour. I am quite a fan of this; the vibrancy, the slight abstratcion of colour and of form.

Just little study of mushrooms I came across on a walk to a waterfall.

I did this one in Tasmania, just trying to explore form and colour but have them emerging from a very dark ground.

I did this in my studio here, just really trying to push myselfin terms of application and colour.

This wee one is 4×6 – not finished yet but close to it. It’s one I have done most recently, I think it is pretty special. More to come.

Understory

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Understory – Tasmania
By Lily Mae Martin
56 x 76cm
Ink on paper
2017

This isn’t the first drawing I have started that was inspired by my recent stay in Western Tasmania, but it is the first to be finished. It was very hard to finish. I’m trying to let the lines speak more – keep the mark making looser. Trying not to go over and over them – render, render, render..

There are parts I feel that I have achieved this more than others, and I am very happy with the results. This is such a depareture from the starkness – the nakedness – of the nudes. There’s so much going on and yet my eyes are lulled into the movement of light and dark. Having the same calming effect on me as listening to white noise. It feels, it is, a different world. And I keep dreaming about it too – behind my eyelids I am back there looking at everything growing out, on, of everything. A branch falls and the tip stabs itself back into the soft earth, and then things grow from it. Evidence that there was movement long ago but this place just readjusted, took it back into itself. A process that took many, many years but time is different there. Everything is different there. I am different there.

Now I am in my studio but part of me still feels like it is there. I must go back to Tasmania, but in what shape that’ll take will have to be seen. It’s just time to make the work now.