The 'Birth Curtain' began with a request to me by the Launceston Birth Centre in 1984. Could I design a background for the newly established birthing centre which would  provide a peaceful environment for the mothers-soon-to-be... Something Natural, which would take their minds away from labour and medical interventions.

"Which aspects of nature do women in labour prefer to think about? " I asked and I was told.. "Water, Birds, and trees".

Yes I replied, I'd  love to do that, but could we include figures?

Figures? Yes, I replied. Birthing doesn't just happen Could we show the stages of pregnancy  and labour too? Could we make the curtain both a celebration of motherhood and a teaching aid? Could we look at pre- Christian  art, a time before  there was shame and guilt about the body's natural functions including pregnancy and birth?

There was a pause here while the committee discussed whether such images might be too "Confronting". Nothing like as Confronting as Birth itself said I, who had been much moved by my own experience assisting in the birth of my own children.

We should celebrate the wonder of this moment in form and colour and do so with the truth of a medical textbook.

The committee needed to think this over snd came back the next day in unanimous agreement. Could they help with design or printing? Of course they could.

Next day I begged some large rolls of blank newsprint paper from the local newspaper, taped them to the long internal corridor of the large old house we lived in, and started drawing; trees, water, birds, but where to begin the figures? And how many?

It seemed natural to start with that private and mysterious moment, known only to her, when the mother first feels her child kick in the womb. At this stage she is still moving freely, even running.

Among aboriginal peoples this moment is sacred; the mother must remember the place which is now a spirit gift to her child, a totem the child must look after for their lifetime.

First of three panels of the completed Birth Curtain, 1985.

STATIONS 0F A BIRTH

 Printed from cut paper stencil and screen printed onto unbleached cotton duck. This was the first of the seven ‘Stations of a Birth’ not that this and the following figure groups owe anything to the Christian story except In that each of the figure groups in the birth curtain are an attempt to freeze a particular moment in time.

1. FIRST KICK 

The woman is young and wholly absorbed in the sensations of wonder which accompany pregnancy, especially at this particular moment, around 4 months after conception, which nothing has prepared her for, when the foetus gives its first kick and she becomes fully aware that she is carrying another life.

The foetus is shown in the X-ray style favoured by traditional Australian Aboriginal painters, a useful shorthand which shows the placement of the internal organs in relief.

As she runs the mother is aware of a protective circle of life around her which follows her as she runs; sometimes it feels like a fluttering, as of birds wings & ‘Of a girl, mad as birds’ (Dylan Thomas), sometimes it is the imprint of her feet on the ground, sometimes it is the movement of wind in her hair which could also be water, or leaves.

 This is also the moment of Spirit conception, sacred in Australian Aboriginal culture when the Spirit of the place enters the embryo through the foot of the mother, and she must take notice of thatplace which becomes the unborn child’s Totem, and as the child grows up they must honour and protect that place.

I used cut paper stencils to delineate the figures in this project because the clean margin produced by a sharp razor shows the outlines of the actors in the drama unambiguously and gives a sculptural and rhythmical feel to the figures. Also because cut paper, cheap as it is, can give a very accurate clear edge to screen printing.

2. EXPLANATION

The role of explanation often falls to the mother. 

The simplest explanation is also the best; this was adapted from a photo of the mother of our daughter, then a year and half, asked where is the baby? 

She simply lifted her dress and pointing to her belly, explained what was happening and would happen.

I included this little tableau in the curtain because it seemed the perfect explanation.

Also because the role of explanation is an important part of the process of pregnancy.  It is  rehearsal for what is to come. The mother needs to prepare her family and all those around her, (herself included) for the momentous changes that lie ahead for all of them.

'Explanation' in the sense of a rehearsal of what is to come has not featured much in European art since a time before the Renaissance when storytelling played a vital role in Art. Giotto was perhaps the last painter who painted entire visual sequences, usually connected with the life and passion of Christ on the walls of the churches in his hometown of Orvieto.

These scenes were of course re enacted as plays in every town and little village in Europe. Everyone knew them and took part in them and the churches and cathedrals were giant concert halls, carved on the outside and painted on the inside, dedicated to telling the Christian story.

The Birth Curtain does not tell a religious story, but the method of storytelling owes much to the art and aesthetic of that era when art was for Everyman. 

Stations of a Birth was a small and humble attempt to present a universal story in a language which could be read by people of all ages including young children. 

The sequence of 'drawn sculptures' which follow the one above are taken from many sources, times and places and are presented to celebrate and explain the mysterious natural pathways we must all follow before we can take our first breath and make our first angry cries on earth.

3. LABOUR

It's not for nothing that the process of giving birth is called Labour. 

Certainly it is a labour for the mother but it is an ordeal for the baby too. There are times during labour when the contractions the mother's uterus is undergoing in order to move the foetus and its placenta along the Birth Canal suppress the baby's heart rate from a cheerful sounding150 beats per minute down to a tenth of that, or less. For the parents listening to the foetal heartbeat on a monitor the heart which sounded like a pony galloping down a dry pathway slows to a canter and then to a walk, and then almost stops.. The parent's hearts stop too of course, until the little heart begins to beat again and is soon galloping down its own private pathway towards the day.

The process for both parents is unlike any other. It is a spiritual journey etched into their memories for life; through joy to terror, terror to pain, pain to tedium, tedium through to the bliss and relief of the Birth.

Roles, and stereotypes are largely cancelled, and though the presence of male partners is often welcomed, they mostly find that their 'Malehood' is best surrendered at the door. They are there to help in this unfamiliar archetypal female world into which they have pitched themselves, one they cannot imagine until they have experienced it, after which it is seared into their memory forever.

4. THE CROWNING

 The moment when the baby’s head appears in the vagina is indeed the crowning point of labour, with birth usually imminent.

The position shown is not necessarily the most comfortable for the mother but is commonly adopted because it allows the midwives to safely catch the baby as it emerges.

It also allows the obstetrician easy access to free the head if forceps are necessary to free the head or the umbilical cord has become tangled around the baby’s neck, as does occasionally happen.

Once the head is out the baby draws its first breath and usually gives a loud, angry yell, which gives cause for relief and celebration among the midwives and much delight to the exhausted mother and her partner.

The rest of the baby’s body follows very quickly and the midwives remove the remnants of the placenta, or caul from the body and rapidly clear the airways so the child can breathe unobstructed.

At this moment the skin of the baby is often bluish, but as it continues to yell and oxygenate its lungs, a patch of pink appears over the heart and spreads rapidly outwards to cover the whole body.

All moments of a birth are wonderful but the moments before and after the crowning happen so fast that they are the most surprising, unpredictable, and magical of all.

5. FIRST TOUCH

An especially tender moment when the midwife lays the baby on the mother’s breast with the umbilical cord still attached. This is the first time the mother has been able to touch the baby and the baby to feel the mother’s hands.

Still exhausted from the long labour, the mother feels an overwhelming relief that her child is safe, and who knows what the baby is feeling at this moment? Relief too very likely, and though not expressible in words at this stage in their life, some people are able later on, and through intense meditation, to remember their sensations before and after their birth with great clarity. (Panel 7). 

When I drew these groups of figures I wanted to express their emotions through their physical presence and their interactions with those around them.

Being suddenly and completely dependent on others is an unusual situation for those born in the twentieth century and beyond but the stages of birthing and motherhood have not changed much since mankind lived in caves during the last ice age, and before.

I wanted to show something that is as true today as it would have been fifty thousand years ago.

Something an explorer might find drawn on the wall of a cave, and still might, one day. Who knows?

6. MOTHER AND CHILD ALONE TOGETHER

7. THE FAMILY CIRCLE

Although the figures in this story were cut into paper and printed onto canvas I thought of them in relief, as groups of 3 dimensional figures, something like the ceramic sculptures by Piero Della Robbia, or the relief carvings in marble favoured by Renaissance sculptors; or even the Greco-Roman friezes where figures are carved in the act of dancing, feasting, or fighting.

 By presenting only the outline of the figures I wanted to give each group a monumental aspect as if they were back lit; simplified sculptures painted in colour as sculptures used to be before the Renaissance came along.

 Each group of figures then became an event on their own, one act in a story divided into seven Acts, or Stations, of which this is the sixth, where the mother, exhausted but fulfilled, allows her family to crowd around the cradle to catch a glimpse of the sleeping child.

 There is an observation by the Plains Indians, ( among other cultures) that the connection between mother and child does not end at birth but continues for as long as the mother is breastfeeding, in the form of a shared illumination which can be perceived as a blue light, emanating from the mother’s womb, but also returned by the child.

This blue light envelops and nurtures them both and the child is aware of it. But it is also fragile and an act of violence or anger by a parent anyone close to the child can extinguish that light, and with it, the child’s spiritual well-being, sometimes for life.

The perception of the blue light; as an awareness shared between mother and child is central to this panel. It is what marks the mother out as unique and irreplaceable to the child quite as much as the child becoming irreplaceable for the mother.

Series of 5 panels, tempera pastel on gesso June to September 2010. No 2. 4 ft x 3 ft or 1m20x 92cm.

Paintings are born from other paintings and that can include the paintings by another artist.

Although the subject of all these paintings was the piercing brilliance of the light in the Tasmanian winter and the richness, by contrast, of the colour in the shadows, the 'colour idea’ had been haunting me for years, ever since I had looked closely at some of the Monets in the Courtauld Museum many years before, and even copied some of them.

I had wondered then and since how Monet could convey such a sensation of warmth using a very minimal palette of orange and violet to evoke the feeling of sunlight on trees or buildings and I include two of my very slight sketch copies here to explain the process.

These were not full copies, they were notes, and each time I went back from Tasmania to London ( about once every 10 years) I could never resist reacquainting myself with all of the painters of the nineteenth century who had changed, over a couple of generations, the way we see colour.

Monet was not alone in this of course. Van Gogh had showed the world how to use yellow and he thought in musical terms about his own and other artist's work. "Cezannes work goes well in gold which shows the colour note is pitched high".

I believe that colour and musical forms are very closely connected and of course I am not alone in this. Newton and Pythagoras also had a great deal to say on the topic so I wont belabour it except to say that rhythm, melody, tone, harmony, key and pitch can all be applied equally to music and painting

If this is a digression it is a necessary one because wherever I start a painting I start out with the simplest possible contrasting sets of colour which can frame the dominant note, in the case of this particular painting, a clear citrus yellow cast by the setting sun on the weather worn rocks that faced west.

After that the process of composition is a gradual one, laying layers lf colour over each other, refining contrasts, conveying the rhythmical notations of the tree forms, veils laid over veils by the She Oaks, and everywhere, standing or fallen the bleached white bones of the dead Eucalypts.

This is not a landscape where you have to invent anything. Some other hand has designed it and moved on. All that's left to an artist to do is record their wonder.

And as for the bones of the hill, the rocks and dolmens....

These were all stones that had never been touched by man. Where they were split by the rain over a thousand years, there did they fall and had remained until I or another came along to paint them another millenium later.

But that is the charm of The Tasmanian Forests and their sadness too. They were a home to the first people who found them and named them. Now that all those names are lost and can never be replaced or their stories retold does not mean that the spirit of these places is alienated from us. Or it need not.

Even perfect strangers to Tasmania find themselves entranced as soon as they walk off the road into a piece of trackless scrub almost anywhere on the Island, and I'm not the only artist whose soul has been stolen by this little remnant of Gondwanaland.

Jonathan Bowden

Digging into an old rucksack the other day I discovered some water drawings I had done with a 6B pencil on a nice rough paper, and which I had completely forgotten about.

What I had not forgotten was that I later sketched these same subjects in pastel on gesso panels, in colour, obviously, but there was no connection in my mind between the pencil drawings and the later pastels, which may have been done a year or more apart.

Did the drawings help me with the pastels? Can a drawing which is not made as a study, later help you with a painting of the same subject?

Possibly, possibly not, but I found it interesting to compare them because although the drawing and the painting are very different, they are of the same event. Perhaps they make a more interesting comparison because they are so far from identical?

I leave it to my audience to judge!

Jonathan Bowden

Last year (2020) I planted some sunflowers with the idea of emulating the greatest of all sunflower painters, Vincent  van Gogh and cutting my flowers to paint in pots and vases indoors.

 But the sunflowers didn't know about van Gogh, had never heard about van Gogh, and from the time they were little striplings with their flowers well hidden in a green whirlpool of leaves were calling out to me. "Look at us, are we not already a marvel. Come back tomorrow and we will show you more..."

 And so, naturally, I went out daily to admire them, to listen to their chatter and their songs and shyly at first they began to peep at me. Just a petal or two at their beginning, and then a ring of brilliant soft yellow with another ring behind it, and another...

Soon they were many, a multitude looking at me with their dark faces framed in a circular blaze of brilliant  yellow petals. 

"Soon I will paint you" I thought as I admired them, but they read my mind and clamoured 

"Soon? Why Soon? You cold hearted man. What is Soon to a flower? Paint us now! We live for the day and the hour. Soon means nothing to us!"

And so I began to paint them first in the afternoon and then on another canvas in the morning. As I added day to day they grew wider and heavier and wilder and more unpredictable and bent their large heads down to look at me until they were resting their shaggy yellow manes on the top of my easel.

"Wait for me to finish" I shouted but they were no longer listening, so I went round behind them and pulled them back with straps to gain a few more days of painting. 

By the end of autumn they were leaning sideways and all ways like a defeated army,  but how glorious they looked as they teeter tottered into winter and I continued to strap them upright again so I could paint them.

So I was never able to imitate van Gogh and put my sunflowers into a vase but I don't think they minded that and in visiting their unfamiliar country I learned the sunflower language which would otherwise have remained alien to me.

This language told me that in order to learn you must visit other countries and that in order to understand your own language you must learn a foreign one.

I found these water drawings in the back of one of my old sketch books a few months ago.

I had forgotten about them but as I flicked through and re-read the commentary I was interested to notice that they were reconstructed from memory.

They are more schematic than if they had been drawn from life. I present them in this Blarney because they seem to demonstrate a method of working which was more often practised in the past than now, which was to look very carefully at something for a long time and then absent yourself from that event and attempt to reconfigure the process you were watching.

The place where they were sourced from was the old Weir and sluice gates at the Millpond in Cambridge where I grew up. I suspect the Cambridge City Council may have cleaned up the old wood and brick framework in the name of tidiness since then, but I hope not.

I will quote from the comments I made with the drawings at the time.

"20th April, 1979.  Exercise. To go out several mornings in succession and observe the same flows and attempt to reconstruct them from memory. Day cool and damp after rain."                      

"Where one powerful fall is enclosed in a trench the water boils along the hollow created between the water falling into the trench and the same water rising up the wall opposite, reversing its flow and falling down again.

Where the two downward flows meet, a continuous rearing margin of water and bubbles rises above and is forced irregularly along the channel in between their opposing flows."

"These are the surface gatherings of the fast currents but a continuous flat sheet of water flows more slowly underneath them, striated by irregularities on the floor of the Millrace."

"As the water gathers from a slow current in the pool to a rapid one in falling over the oak planks that form the weir it creates a vacuum underneath the water into which air is drawn back by suction along the tops of the planks.

"If a jet of water is created by angling a plank into the surface of the fall, a thin flat sheet of water is deflected outward from the race and bowed into a curve by the air pressure underneath it. The edges of the sheet gather into a thicker margin of droplets and fruity swellings which travel backward slowly, relative to the rapid forward movement of the centre of the sheet.

"Or if the same plank is drawn rapidly through the still surface of the river, a similar thin transparent sheet or part globe of water is raised from the surface, whose outer margins thicken into tendrils which extend and are nipped off into an even shower of droplets just before they rejoin the surface of the river."

"As a plank is lowered into the depth of untroubled water beginning its path over the weir the water divides and rejoins behind the interruption of the plank and an almost flat floor of water, cobbled by the irregularities in the sawn end of the plank is visible between the combed back walls of the interrupted flows."

"As the plank is pushed further down into the faster layers that skim the surface of the weir air is drawn in under the flow to the edge of the plank and the striations lengthen into ribs joined by thin webs like a Swan's foot."

"Where the main flow meets a lesser but faster one at an angle the main flow runs under the lesser one which is forced into a curving diagonal by the main current, foam rising and bubbling in the corner where the tops of the two flows meet and are forced against the brickwork into eddies and little whorls. Where the combined flows run flat down the sloping brick and meet the river below, little heads dance up and fold over one another like Bats fighting."

"Folding and Rippling.  The iron sockets of the weir gate made hollows in the brickwork into which the water was deflected in circular eddies. As the eddies returned upon themselves and met the slipstream of the water in between them, very tiny and precise ripples like a Snake's scales trembled between the meeting of the opposing streams."

"This was a surface reverberation not affected by the mass flow of the water, or cuffs of water which rose fatly up the plank and folded back upon themselves into the river, creating the raised collars between which the little Snake scales were buffeted.

"When water from a rapid mill race enters a placid shallow pool it forces a long tongue into the still water that turns up and backwards into breaking wavelets as well as sideways into eddies and slower lateral swirls."

The little backward breaking wavelets peak above the level of the pool and the trough behind them is lower, the succession of reverberating swirls being carried 40 feet or more into the pond. There must be a reverse in the direction of the swirls under the peaks of the flow in order to raise the backward breaking wavelets above the level of the pool."

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This little Native Cherry tree caught my eye as I was traversing a hill one afternoon a couple of months ago. The Native Cherry is always a fresh light or dark green in or out of drought. Perhaps because its roots fix atmospheric nitrogen it always seems to remain healthy especially when seen against the scrubby sparseness of Native Box and the soft greys of the Eucalypts.

This particular tree seemed to burn with a yellowish green fire all of its own and I began the underpainting with a pair of contrasting colours; citrus yellow green for the tree and a cool pink foundation for the taller Eucalypts that surrounded it.

Pink is a good underpainting for grey, and a grey violet would help to differentiate the forest background from the high yellow green note of the Cherry tree.

The base layers in any medium are important because they give a glow and a warmth to the colours laid over them.

The colours I choose in the first hours also act as a memory trace for that first colour sensation, and I often note my first colour choices down on a piece of bark which I carry in my rucksack as a reminder for the duration of the painting.

In this case I also decided to keep a photographic record, something I have started to do since I got hold of a Smartphone as it rather smugly calls itself. But it does have a good camera.

I found the sequence interesting to look at after I had finished the painting and I present the stages here in order to demonstrate some of the processes this particular painting went through from start to finish, and in the hope other artists may be interested to look at them.

I work over many sessions, fixing each layer of pastel with a thin spray of water and yolk of egg as I go, so after a few coats it can be difficult to recall that first colour sensation, the 'Colour Tune'.

This matters, because the immediate colour sensations you have in front of a subject are the truest.

On the day I begin a painting I look first for a simple colour plan by selecting a pair of harmonious contrasting colours on which I can build variations, in order to make from it a painting which will project sensations of space and depth to the eye from a distance, in any light, including and especially twilight. If I can still see everything in the painting with almost no light I am happy with it. Or if I find faults it is easier in this light to identify exactly where they are and to correct them.

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I think of this development, from the simple to the much more complex as the symphonic character of painting; just as turning a simple melody into a symphony can be an ambition for a musician turning a simple 'Colour Tune' into a complex and interesting spatial structure can be an worthwhile ambition for a painter.

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In the process of repeated workings the colours can go dull on me and pulling them back from a sludge of greys or worst still, discordancies is a task shared by most of the painters I know, as we drink endless flasks of tea in the forest or the studio and work on an uncooperative painting. This is the necessary drudgery of art.

I find that starting directly into colour allows a more dynamic and rhythmical process of composition than tying down all the boundaries with line too early. That can come later when I start to look for a stronger tonal structure. In some ways the whole painting is a colour beginning because it is not completed until the tonal structures and contrasts are fully established and that doesn't usually happen until the final sitting.

I call this Cherry Tree 'Mystical' because in Tasmania every patch of untouched bush seems to consist of infinitely varied forms lit by the impulse of some mysterious, visionary imagination. This little Cherry Tree seemed to feel a part of that so tactfully that I felt I could do no less than to celebrate its simple magic.

When you are working on one painting, sometimes that painting suggests the possibility of another one or even several more.

With 'The River in Flood', I began to think of a series of panels as I was working on the first one. It seemed a shame to let this river flow away into infinity without capturing more of it, and so I began a second panel almost as soon as I had completed the first, standing on the same spot but looking further downstream.

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When I had finished both panels I lined them up on the studio wall stepwise, as shown below, in order to reinforce the actuality of the water levels falling continuously downstream.      

I soon realised the explanation they gave of the rapids was incomplete. It was quite hard to work out how the water got from one to the next so I decided I needed a third panel to go in between the first and second panels. In effect a triptych.

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It was winter by the time I got back to the river, the light was much harsher and the willows had lost their leaves which explains the violence of the orange highlights in the water. Together with photos of the triptych hung in sequence I also show a 'colour beginning' which was made further down the same river but ten years earlier.

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I include this because I think it explains how all of the panels were started using a minimal range of colours; white, black, green, dark and light blue and violet for the water, and a warm brown base for the rocks.

This 'underpainting' allows me to explore the drawing but also provides a pigment base which gives a warmth to the colours which are laid over the top of it.

Laying down one colour, fixing it, and applying a different but related colour over the base coat gives a glow to the pigment which cannot be achieved with a flat coat of pastel (or paint) however thick. This is especially true for pastel.

I apply the pigment in layers but without blending, working from a base of gesso, silica, and yoke of egg and fix with a fine aerosol spray or mist of water.

As the pigment dries, it is fixed from behind by the yolk of egg in the board and the egg gives the pigments a luminosity otherwise only associated with tempera. The lights remain light, but the dark colours become richer and darker.

This recipe has been used for centuries beginning with frescos, and a similar fix, (skim milk) was used by Degas, which is how he achieved those luminous colours.

I include photos of the triptych taken in close up from the side to show how successive fixed layers of pigment can give a three dimensional quality to the surface of the painting. This procedure which is only possible using a yolk of egg fixative for several successive layers of pigment also increases sensations of space, depth and surface movement within the painting.

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This painting, which eventually became a group of three paintings, began in the Spring of 2012 when I put my head over the bridge at Corralin Gorge and the roar of the flood waters below soon became irresistible.

Later that day I prepared some large gesso panels on plywood, and next morning early I scrambled down the goat track to the North Esk River and went to look for where the noise was loudest. It was easy to find, at the end of a wide and placid pool where the river is forced between boulders into a long and smooth tongue of water which moves so fast that its surface remains smooth and transparent like a curved reflecting lens through which the greenish black rocks are still visible.

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 As this waterfall gulps down air a multitude of little bubbles are created which fight and jostle with each other underwater until they can break upwards through the surface of the stream into masses of silvery blue foam.

It is a joyous process to watch once you have found yourself a secure foothold to watch it from, and you have the advantage, now you are there, of being able to study the same processes over and over again all the way down the river until you begin to see patterns within the chaos.

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 This is not something a camera could do for you, because vital tool as a camera is, it can only record. It cannot perceive or interpret patterns that repeat over time; nor can it close its eyes at night and remember what it saw and heard during the day. Nor can it remember the smells of dry leaves and wet rock, or hear the orchestra of sounds made by water falling, or coin words for them as the native Tasmanians could and did.

The sound that turbulent water makes, a continuous roar within which a rumble and a pulse can be detected is represented in the Palawa language by "moe-win-e-dur-um", which vividly suggests stones turning over underwater.

For the more delicate sounds the little flows make as they meander and splash at the margins, "lea-lari-ghtea", and most powerful of all, "Mangana-Lienta" which could be Latin if the Romans had thought of it first but no; they drowned in nouns, verbs, and adjectives; and so do we, whereas the first Tasmanians sang their metaphors for nature aloud.

This small pencil drawing shows a parallel event to the larger pastel but in miniature, a Bonzai'd waterfall as it were. The process of water dragging down air as it falls headlong into a pool below, the flow of water contained by rocks and the frictional drag of the slower currents against the rock faces are all perhaps easier to read at this small and much tamer scale. The wind ripples which move the surface of the water backwards against the direction of the current can be seen at the bottom right of the drawing. In a major flood they would of course be invisible.

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For paintings where there are violent contrasts of tone from the black rocks up to the bluish white foam I begin the drawing almost in monochrome; just enough to show the patterns and follow the corrugations that water is forced into as it is slowed and lifts up its surface on its approach to a rock, or gathers into a waterfall which plunges down and buries itself in a mass of bubbles in the pool below.

This pastel sketch is not so much an unfinished painting as the finished beginning of another water painting, and over the course of this Blog (what a hideous word, Blog, who created it? It sounds like  something stuck in a toilet), over the course of this Blarney I shall show more of them. I include 'At the Bend' (painted along the same river a few years earlier) in order to indicate how I attempt to reduce the first description of a complicated event into a simple colour language which can be worked over with successive layers of pastel, fixing thoroughly between coats so as to preserve the clarity of the first idea.

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At the end of a mornings frantic drawing, I pack up and scramble back up the cliff towing my panel behind me one handed like a child's blanket. Then there will be a break. Perhaps it rains in the night and the rocks are too slippery to risk it. But soon another day dawns fine, and then by looking at what I have done I get an idea of what to do next and I go back.

Over the weeks this first observation turns into an explanation, a rendering into line and colour of what I have experienced every day, down there, wedged between rocks at the base of cliffs which have been hacked and smoothed from dolerite by a river which has bullied and tormented, and rejoiced and sung its way along that same course for hundreds of thousands of years.

Jonathan Bowden

A world class exhibition space in the middle of nowhere might sound odd to many ears, until you hear that the place is Cradle Mountain in Tasmania.

Originally designed as a naturally lit gallery for wilderness photography, the design of the rooms is ideal for paintings or prints, and when I was offered the chance to show a selection of my work there about a year ago I readily accepted it.

Soon after I began working in Tasmania, using pastel and tempera on large gesso panels, outdoors and in all seasons, I had the idea that at some stage I would like to present all of my work as a sequence,  or a collection of sequences, a 'Book of hours and Seasons' encompassing the astonishing beauty and purity of the Tasmanian landscape, a landscape the like of which disappeared a thousand years ago from Europe, and from most other places in the world.

This exhibition includes paintings from some of those many pastel on panel series in which I have tried to distill the essential features of a place, a weather, a time of day, a season; and it also includes the first twelve examples of a print on watercolour paper series which I have been developing with the assistance of a very expert printer in Hobart, Simon Olding.

Eventually I plan to produce another 48 prints in this series, with the overall title 'Of Stone and Shadows', which will I hope allow strangers, as well as local Tasmanians, to gather intimate glimpses, as well as an overall picture, of the extraordinary landscape which has over the last 30 years become my obsession. 

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This winter past, 2017, I decided to work small, about one third the size I am used to, and to treat the intensely dramatic Tasmanian sunset in a rocky landscape more as I would a still life painted indoors.

I wanted to create sensations of solidity and roundness in the rocks and trees, and investigate the long black shadows cast by the trees and even by myself sometimes as my own shadow preceded me up the hill and into the forest.

I also thought it would be interesting to keep a record of my colour beginnings because these underpaintings become lost in the process of painting.  Perhaps lost is the wrong word because without these base layers of pigment the top coats would lack richness.

Below I am showing the beginning and the end of a painting together in order to indicate that the first stages are drawn directly in colour, without line, in order to establish a rhythmical basis for the composition. If I used line, I might not be able to see the colour basis for the subject.

Jonathan Bowden

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