"The Eye of the Eagle"

 "Gorge and engorged" 68 cm x 48 cm Mixed Media on D'Arches

This recent month has seen me hard at work in my studio imagining flying over the deserts of Central Australia as an eagle and then putting this down on paper. I was amazed whilst reading up on eagles and how they see, to learn that they have pentachromatic vision (we have tetrachromatic). Eagles can see ultraviolet and infrared colours - so Wow!

Pondering the complexity of this, I felt that they saw far more brightly than we did and so I pushed a few colours round in Photoshop to see what effects I could get. All this dreaming and fiddling around has led to very colourful exhibition indeed. At first I found it too much but as I settled into it, the paintings burned into my soul and I now feel quite at home with them and their intense colours.

Why eagles and why now? Firstly, recent heatwaves have crossed the country leaving it bare and exposed, dry and parched. Daily reminders of the planet getting hotter, have left me wondering once again about Climate Change; is it real, why does it happen and what does it mean?

I don't have answers to this although I find it extraordinarily fascinating......like most of us I believe.

Australia is the driest and harshest continent on the planet with the most ancient and exposed soils. Millions of years have passed and former mountains have eroded down into floodplains and deserts. These cover over 90 % of Australia. The colours when viewed from a plane, are bright reds, oranges and yellows with tracks and dry river beds crisscrossing the land.

Secondly, I feel, if we could read the land, if we could understand the patterns and their meanings, then just maybe we could learn to live with the earth successfully. We could stop building cities on fertile lands and fields, we could build for temperature and climate changes, we could do things better. It's true we've survived for almost 5 million years but the recent upswing in our skills has hurt the planet more than ever before and now we worry about our own survival as a species for probably the first time ever in our history.

I have painted these paintings from a deep part of myself that yearns for a greener place, a safer place but at the same time is amazed and drawn to the wondrous colours of the earth.

Australia may be the oldest and most exposed place right now, but believe me, it's where other countries are headed over the next few thousands of years as the glaciers dry up and and the mountains erode down to floodplains and deserts. Look at this place, Australia and learn for this is where you are headed. It is not a country that can sustain many more people than it currently does......it is not the lucky country it once was.......and we will need to move whole towns and populations as the heat increases and the desert continues to grow ever larger.

There is no doubt in my mind that human activity here in this 'sacred' place has exacerbated the rate of desertification. The ripping out of whole forests, the ploughing and chemical spraying of large tracks of land, the channeling of water away from floodplains and marshlands continues today despite the warnings written already in our land and able to be seen by the eagles looking for their old hunting grounds.

Try looking at the earth through 'the eye of the eagle'!

The exhibition can be seen at Jayes Gallery in Molong NSW from 5 February to 7 March or online closer to that date.

Summer turns up the heat!

Summer is really here with temperatures soaring inside the studio to over 30 degrees let alone outside.....temps at 35 degrees and higher! Tonight it's still 30 degrees outside at midnight (or nearly!) and bush fires burning in South Australia and Victoria on catastrophe alert!

But all the while, it's raining across the desert and the water is collecting in Lake Eyre. There's floods to the north of here whilst we languish with little water in the town. The amazing thing is, the mines nearby (Cadia Mines) have just announced another extension which will need a further 6 mega litres daily from an already ailing system. Our town doesn't have the luxury of a river nearby but relies totally on local rainfall for the supply. And we are told that the mine is already planning to mechanise the processes so there will be a short burst of employment then back to the same number of employees as we have today. Once the mine water goes through the system, guess what, it's unusable in any form and so can't be returned to the system.

Amazing shortsightedness.....all about money and a once very beautiful town, the Colour City, now becoming "the brown town" very quickly!

As an artist, I have painted many works on climate change, been collected by the Federal Department for Climate Change and one of my paintings (a collaboration with Nyree Reynolds - aboriginal artist) sits at the doors to the Conference Rooms for Climate Change in Canberra. It is a warning......I wonder if anyone ever stops to consider it?

The exhibition I am currently painting is also about the changes to our landscape and the lack of water......not that many people want to think about it! But it constantly keeps in front of me and I fear for the future of this place.

In the north hemisphere, the winters are the coldest for many years...wish they could send some of the snow down here! But still we use up all the fossil fuels we can, we don't lobby governments to change and we idly stand by as they send 45,000 people to a conference designed to fail......imagine the carbon footprint of that exercise alone?

For my bit, I am trying to adjust down and this year is my year of 'clearance' and I am determined to reduce the size of my personal footprint to as low as possible and repurpose what I can. Tonight I sit here and wonder how simple it can get......I live in a small studio, I wash by hand, I dry my clothes on an old fashioned clothes line and I walk a fair bit nowadays. The cooler is currently turned off as I sit here sweating away writing this.....the studio is in darkness and the doors are all open waiting for a breeze to spring up but it will be closer to morning when the breezes come. They say tomorrow will be worse than today and I expect it will reach over 37 degrees here tomorrow (for the temperature challenged, that is over 104 degrees F)

I wonder if people will come to my next solo show and I wonder even more, if they will want to invest in art that is so "hot" and 'dry'? "The Eye of the Eagle" - a bird's eye view of what we are doing to this sacred place.......

Is this the Australia that we should know about? It is written in the geology of the land that this has happened many times before....Australia is a land of cycles of extensive drought and heat followed by floods and cooler weather.....is this just another cycle or is there anything bigger going on here? And can we as humans make a difference? I wonder.......and wonder......how about you?

Thinking about 2009 and beyond as the bushfires burn.....

Waking up this morning to yet another extreme day (temps will be over 35 again) and with the smell of a distant bushfire in the air, I can't help wondering how Copenhagen talks re Climate Change will work out. My thoughts also wander to my grandchildren and I wonder what the planet will be like for them.

Over recent years, my serious art has depicted climate change (scroll down page to see "Spirit of the Land) and the drying of the Australian landscape. Indeed, I thought it important enugh as a subject to take it to Florence and there I was awarded a prize. But I wonder if it was because the judges saw the artworks as being relevant to today or was it the techniques I use to dribble and layer and colour the paintings. Did anyone even notice that my painting was a statement on what is happening to our beloved 'earth'. I know Charlotte Lugt got the message and was very excited that an artist would paint about the climate.

Those paintings glow out from the walls at you eerily, they're hot and dry and parched......they warn you of impending heat and fire; not unlike waking today and smelling smoke from fires close by. The acrid eucalypt smell pervades my room and brings back memories of fires seen over my lifetime.

Australia is hotter now than I ever remember, certainly dryer now in this area than I have known it to be. And with summer only one week in, I wonder how we will cope. My mother used to say "like mad dogs and Englishmen, standing out in the hot day's sun!" and that is what we have become. I am personally thankful that I can arrange my day around the midday heat but when are we going to introduce a siesta for Australia to help people who work through the heat.

I attended a rural women's conference recently to hear of what changes need to be made on our farms to cope with the continuing upward climb of temperatures. Hotter and wetter summers for this area, dryer and frostier winters.....different grasses, new ways of growing crops. All food for thought. At least there is a dialogue going on. I am reminded of how adaptable humans are. I wonder if we are governed now by money and regulations to the point where we can't change though. While people are flexible and adaptable, banks and governments aren't.

Our Prime Minister is off trotting around the globe to his conferences. Today they talk about Climate Change in Copenhagen and how to offset carbons in the environment. One wonders if he wouldn't be better off at home planting a tree or two instead. Carbon credits are basically now another commodity for the big banks to trade and the rich to get richer on. On the ground, there is little being done......reafforestation, replanting back native pastures and scrub lands, rebuilding wetlands and protecting species are all off the agenda as 'they' talk about how to keep the money flowing and stay with coal trading etc. Surely we need to be talking about new energy sources such as wind power and solar power and how to get them replacing coal as quickly as possible.

I continue to paint away in my studio; I continue to read Peter Andrews and his book "Back from the Brink"; I continue to live my rather simple life and downsize where I can and I continue to be intrigued by a planet that will survive long after 'humans' are extinct and I wonder what the 'new' species will be like.......hmmmm maybe I'll paint them!