RIVERROSE was painted outdoors on a verandah.
The feeling I get when I see a blank canvas for the first time is awe.
What will you be? Where will you go? How shall I best bring you to being?
These are silent questions that come as I run my hands over the taut primed cloth. Behind it lay the struts, the timber pieces that will hold everything in place. In the case of RIVERROSE, the canvas was quite large; taller than me when stood on its end. I realised that I would practically need to lie on it to access the top if she were to sit in Portrait. Fortunately, I could feel that she wished to recline on the easel like a French woman, taking her sieste.
Notice how the canvas has become a woman and French, at that… It is how I begin to draw her out and to paint the whims and ways forming her nature. Beside me as I begin is a large tub of modelling paste, a white gloopy cream that I will use to contour the underpainting and create a texture to raise the paint into whipped up waves, mountains and valleys. This gloop eventually sets fast and remains a petticoat to the painting.
On a beaten table next to me lie my tools, brushes, paint tubes, palettes, knives and gloves. There is an old jug, containing fresh flowers: roses. These, I have grown in pots and cut to bring upstairs. There are also photographs of their ancestors, roses of reds and pinks and sunshine yellows. Ones that once were either grown by me or were gifts and now survive in my memory. They and the roses in the pots remind me why I wish to paint roses this day. Their voluptuous sensuality and scents, some like Turkish delight and others like scented mineral teas is what I wish to paint.
Suddenly, I am overwhelmed by the endless flowing and lapping of the river and the insane floral beauty that fills my senses. I begin to scoop out spoonfuls of modelling paste and put it on the canvas in globs. This is both shaped with a palette knife or caressed with my fingers until there are beautiful ghost-flowers, rivers and skies. There are also the staccato points of the Indigenous dances I feel still resonating in the earth beneath my feet and my fingertips plot and lift, plot and lift to dance over the canvas.
How truly grateful I am to be given this time to spend with the earth, water, sky and trees, I think to myself as I lay down the paste. Eventually, I am finished the white wall of gloop.
A light breeze has sprung up and my belly tells me to eat, knowing I have time while it dries. I turn to face the river and see that there is a City Cat ferry cruising by. My neighbour’s cat is snoozing in the shade of the bamboo in my garden. I thread a piece of cord through the struts of the canvas and tie it to the easel, suspecting the puffs of breeze of becoming more gusty as the tide changes. I go inside to eat some bread, cheese and pickled gherkin and leave RIVERROSE to commune with the river.