Lubeck trees in real life

Normally; first there is my painting ... and then Mother Earth imitates me with a pale shadow of my natural treasures.
That's how it happens all the time! Being a painter is a case of self-confidence, isn't it?

Somewhere in Spain, Mother Nature has been ahead of me.
I created the painting named 'September' a long time ago, in the year 2001.
But ... last year I saw some amazing pictures of a couple of trees in Madrid. I discovered them on the site of Flora Wigleven.
I couldn't deny that these trees must have started their lives long, long before (!) the canvas of September was even woven ...

Aren't they beautiful? Maybe a re-decoration of the earth has already started.

An outer space forest

Inspiration can come from anything!
This afternoon I found a miniature landscape in my garden. Close up it was a bunch of clear, almost glassy stems with a more than yellow bulb at the top. The bulbs of the longest stems were coloured to bronze. It seems like a beautiful little forest on one of the planets far away from here ...

Please click on the pictures for the full effect:



From close-up stepping back into the earthy dirt, I discovered it was just a turd ...
Made by one of my roommates. As seen by the fungoid state it must have been done light-years ago.

Insects eggs

Last summer I found another perfect example of natural geometry in my vegetable garden. The tiny (almost) symmetrical patterns in these pictures were attached to a leaf of one of my bean plants. As far as I can tell, these are eggs laid by a shield bug or stink bug. The bug itself is a rather quirky looking leaf eater, they can become a pest though. The second picture shows nature's clever solution: a small parasitizing wasp. It's larvae eat the eggs and thus keep the bug population under control.

On my easel now

Some of my work is based on natural shapes and forms I encounter in and around my garden.
One of the paintings I am presently working on has a very direct link to a shrub growing in my garden. It's a Cape Gooseberry, a fruit generally only used as a garnish in restaurants. Probably because they are so ingeniously packaged inside their paper like lampoon.
If the berries are left to weather, the lampoon turns into this wonderful delicate gauze allowing a good peek at the berry itself. I am using this visual effect in a slightly different form in the work in progress below.



Here's another landscape I'm working on at the moment.
This one has no obvious link to anything growing in my garden. Although the subject might have to do with the fact that we live in an active volcanic region ;-)

Alien invasion

Sometimes the weirdest stuff happens right in your back yard. It's been quite rainy the last couple of days and I was amazed by what popped out of the ground next to my compost heap. At first I thought these were the remains of some sort of plastic toy but the material was just a bit too organic. The shape was very geometrical and not attached to anything. A couple more similar objects started to appear from egg like bulbs just below the ground. My next thought was that I had stumbled across some freshly landed aliens ready to roll their way into the world.....
But after a bit of online research, I found out these are actually native NZ organisms called a basket fungi. Such a surreal piece of nature and the eggs are even edible!

More snow

The first few layers of a new work.
After our trip to South Africa last spring, I was inspired to create a painting of a landscape covered in snow. It took me until winter arrived in New Zealand to come up with the right idea. The final bit of inspiration came from a Camellia I recently spotted on my walk into town. The freshly fallen flowers will return in this painting but with a twist....

Inspiration

People often ask me about my inspiration. To be quite honest, the conceptual stage of my art is often more elimination than inspiration. The initial idea usually appears when my mind is sort of idling, like when I'm traveling or taking a shower. From there it's is primarily a matter of bringing the idea back to the essential. This means I'm usually throwing away 90%.

In general my work is much closer to reality than meets the eye. Most of my ideas come from ordinary things around me; landscapes, seeds, flowers, buildings and I take lots of reference photos. The images below illustrate the relationship between the initial concept and the finished painting. The first image shows a Pinus Radiata plantation close to were I live. You can see the influences in both Populus flucta and Sequoiadendron nemus.
The second one shows some berries of a Flax Lily I found while walking the dog. Most of the fruit fell off when I walked home, but enough was left for a sketchy picture. The last image illustrates the optical characteristics of solid crystal. Just click on the images to see the resulting art works.