How To Make A Painting Of A Big Snake.

This is the first of my museum paintings- Museum I (Python) - and below it is the initial study I made. I thought you might find a window onto my process interesting.

I always start with thumb-nail sketches and move through a number of steps before arriving at the final painting. The initial, exploratory pencil-work sometimes becomes quite detailed but is never intended to be seen by anyone. It's all about trying to give shape to whatever idea I am fumbling towards and I usually make a number of these drawings. Vertical and horizontal lines are very carefully considered and placed, sometimes taking the Golden Section into account. Linear perspective also has to be carefully adhered to in order to produce a convincing illusion of depth and space. The python painting is an example of two point perspective- that is, all the horizontal lines, depending on their direction, recede to vanishing points far outside either the left or the right side of the image. When I finally think I have things worked out, I may move on to the final painting or, as has been my habit lately, I might produce a small study in oils first. There are no hard and fast rules about how things proceed- it's a process of refining and distilling elements of the picture to arrive at the clearest statement I can make.

I tend to work on two or three paintings at a time so, although the python was the first of the series I conceived, I was also working on a dinosaur and another shark at the same time. The White Shark paintings are, of course, not really all that separate from these new paintings but I'd started them before the versatility of the museum, as an over-arching motif, had occurred to me- and so I think of them as a separate body of work, despite the shared setting. After my last show (and while I was painting the first shark paintings) I was thinking that all this new work would be in some way, even if only tangentially, related to the sea. I even made another pier painting between sharks, which now somehow feels like a waste of time. It's not a bad painting but, in retrospect, it seems like I wandered down a blind alley. Each painting can take three to six weeks to produce and so a mistake in direction can be costly. These things trend to evolve organically and I wish at times that I could just sit down and contrive an entire body of work ahead of time- you know, decide on the imagery, lay out the themes, work out what might be most likely to sell... For some reason it doesn't really work that way.

All of my paintings are grounded in something real. Sometimes a painting is prompted by something I've seen out in the world (as was the case with this painting) and sometimes I have an idea and have to go looking for the real-world details to flesh it out. It's too difficult to convincingly invent the particulars. The most entertaining examples of this lately (for me personally at least) are the dinosaurs. I have little museum-grade replica... "toys", for want of a more dignified word, that I photograph and then exaggerate in scale for the resulting paintings. Yes reader, buying toy dinosaurs is not only a legitimate thing to do but also a tax deduction. It's like a dream come true.

When it comes to the python painting, the general architecture and the glass display case are based on The Museum of Victoria and appear much as they do in life. At the actual location, however, the dinosaur display in the background features a skeleton while the glass case contains two stuffed pythons and also the skeleton of a third. Basically, I've tweaked and massively simplified things to make a better picture. That is, I've changed things to make a more concise statement, both aesthetically and conceptually. You can probably also spot differences between the study and the final painting. I've tightened the composition and further simplified things. The best example of all this is the doorway behind the snake. In the final version, I made the top of the glass case opaque and also moved the edge of the door further to the left so that it wasn't in conflict with the frame of the display case. Essentially, what I did was eliminate visual clutter.

The model for the shark paintings (a large fibre-glass fellow with an engagingly toothy smile) is also at The Museum of Victoria, incidentally- hanging in a very awkward position in the foyer. I wish the museum hadn't moved to it's present location in Carlton. I hate these shinny new, interactive museums. Give me some crumbling Victorian pile any day. It would be far better for the paintings, if not the edification of the general public...