The Bush
The bush is messy. It’s hard to draw.
The hand and the brain have a special connection. When you keep drawing, or writing without pause you allow your back brain to come forward. The handy journal or sketchbook keeps you alert to what you are living, seeing, feeling. Otherwise it can all turn into a river of sludge, and no one wants that.
After moving to the Blue Mountains in 2015 I needed to be in the bush to see where I was. I was drawing and painting, and soaking it all up, letting it in. Sitting on the banks of Megalong Creek with my dogs and my painting buddy doing countless drawings and paintings, large and small. Occasionally, a friend who knows her birds joins us.
Sometimes we sit in the middle, where the creek widens and thins, trickles between the crevices of broad dry rocks. I sit where the water washes over my feet, sketchbook in hand.
Or I spread sheets of heavy paper or canvas around and paint with big swooping gestures. Once I floated partially worked papers downstream and ran along the bank to collect them.
How dry it was . The creek dropped. The colours of my palette began to heat up as the landscape did. That was before the bushfires of 2019-2020. But that’s another story.