Art by Dan Burke

Category: Painting

  • A Bubbling brew…

    Storm surf with HMAS Sydney in the background
    HMAS Sydney set against the distant Beecroft Peninsula, riding the swell after storms,
    Jervis Bay NSW

    It’s hard to imagine what it would be like bobbing around in a tin boat on a cold winter day, but this is sort of what it looks like. After almost a week of heavy rain, wind, and generally belligerent weather one of our destroyers turned up in the bay sitting as they often do just off the Beecroft peninsular that forms the north eastern shore of Jervis Bay. Sometimes they moor down near the naval college on the southern shore of the bay.

    After a day or two the ships disappear, to who knows where. Considering the shallow nature of the bay I’ve often wondered where they find the depth to avoid running aground.

    Painting waves is something of a challenge at the best of times but after storms the run-off from the local creeks turn the waters of the bay into a green-brown soup and with a bit of extra swell the result is a lot of ‘ice-cream’ as I like to call it. This bubbling brew of foam and seaweed with the odd tree trunk or branch that has washed out of the creeks [often with a few drowned native animals unfortunately] can take weeks to wash the beach clean again.

    The additional size of the swell produced by storm activity loads waves with a lot more power than your normal sunny days holiday playground type wave activity, so discretion is the better part of valour if you want to keep your body in one piece. Of course, most young people don’t care about this concern of mine, but I’m a big wave chicken after several nasty run-ins with some very big waves when I was young.

    I washed the basic sections of the composition in first, trying to get some sense of colour and value, then quickly brushed in the colour behind the main area of activity, the curl of the wave (the bit you don’t want to get smashed by) and the foamy wash in the foreground. At this stage it’s very rough, produced with a No. 8 flat hog bristle brush.

    Once I decided I was on the right track I set about deciding if I could use some areas of that broad brushwork in the final work. In this painting, that included most of the foreground “ice-cream”, the left and right ends of the wave and the sky and peninsular at the top. The sky is almost an untouched original wash. I like to think the viewers eye is more than capable of fooling their brain into making up the detail – I might be delusional too! However, it works for me so I’m happy to try it.

    There is one caveat to this method of creating a painting – those sketchy rough areas must contribute, must seem almost a natural part of the completed picture… I can decide but only you can tell if this works.

  • A cold winter morning

    Very cold too. My first university post was a few hours to the east of my home at that time and the journey took me across the Blue Mountains to the edge of the Sydney Plain. For over a year I passed this place several days a week morning and night, always, as the saying goes, driving into the sun (ADITS – according to the students). At Katoomba near the top of the range the highway slid round this bend and the sun always hit me right in the eyes – sunglasses could never beat it.

    Bend In The Road

    So one day I recorded the scene, of which this painting is a small part (the most interesting part to me), jumped back in the car and kept going… you guessed it, “always driving into the sun”.

    The scene was just one of those places/times/whatevers that sticks in your mind until you give in and do something with it, even though we’re talking some thirty years later now.

    I liked the light bouncing off the road markings that made them ribbon-like, hard-edged, high contrast bands leading your eye around the curve and around the painting. This, in contrast to the soft light forms of morning wood-fire smoke and cloudy mountain mists clearing to a bright winter’s day.

    Interesting to me at the time and just wouldn’t go away whenever I looked back on it – perhaps the scene just fed the boredom of a long drive. Perhaps I just like the abstract quality of it, but here it is.

    Painted in acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 30cm.

  • Kangaroos, snakes and fairy tales

    “The Grove At Magdala” was a happy place for me. Infested with that colonial curse Lantana and inhabited by kangaroos, snakes, goannas and bugs of all kinds I took it on myself to tame it to my satisfaction – that is to say I wanted it to remain wild, but interesting. I mowed and cleared tracks all through the Grove, an acre or two of forested land on the slope just down from the house at the edge of the area we kept clear from bushfires and so we could see any pests, like snakes.

    The Grove At Magdala.

    Snakes tended to skid across my tracks when I was charging through on my trusty John Deere ride-on but kangaroos would just stand there staring at me as if they couldn’t possibly take me seriously. The local farmers probably thought I couldn’t be taken seriously either, tearing around on a ride-on mower more often than not with dust billowing everywhere drifting across the road onto their washing lines. While living there we were never challenged by bushfire and only occasionally chased by goannas.

    I loved getting in there in amongst the twigs and branches, piles of Lantana and the wildlife. The birdlife flourished in there too. It was full of the smells of the Australian bush and that odd herb-like smell of Lantana – surely a leftover from pre-historic times. This painting shows the start of the main trail veering to the left between the trees and down into the grove late on a summer afternoon.

    The light spears across the ground and winds it’s way deep into the forest behind. The tree trunks and dead Lantana rods were always silvery at this time of day.

    The painting is acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 30cm.