Drought and Myself.

 Continuing the discussion about Drought, I wish to speak about the effects on my life. We seem to spend a considerable amount of time looking at weather maps, reading about the weather and hoping for some good rain to fall. We live in an area of Qld, Australia where the rainfall is supposed to be a bit more reliable than some other parts of Qld. You definitely would not think that at the present time and we know of people in the Wide Bay Burnett region considerably worse off than us.

This is reflected in many of my art pieces. I want to show you a photo I found on FB during the severe western Qld drought a few years back. I cannot acknowledge the owner as it was posted to the Who Got The Rain Group page and I could not "track them down" from there. It was too poignant a photo for me to ignore it. It was taken outside  Longreach showing the bare state of the grazing property with the stark storm clouds rolling in hopefully to deliver some very much needed rain. It shows the flatness of the horizon of outback Qld and it is something every Australian should make an effort to visit at least once in the lifetime ( the Outback as we call it).

I took this photo with me for my Working In A Series Class with Lisa Call (2016) as inspiration. After a few smaller pieces were made at the workshop, she suggested taking a different approach with colour.

I played around with colour  and came up with this piece. I have mounted it on canvas and it has been hanging in our lounge room ever since, where I walk past it numerous times a day and think of drought, Longreach and abstracted lanscapes and of course the WIA Series workshop with Lisa.

I want to show you another drought piece made in 2019 when we were still battling a severe drought in Spring that year. 

 Even in the driest of deserts you can find underground water if you know how to find it and there are enough dollars in your pocket to tap into it. Qld has the Great Artesian Basin under a lot of it and I can vividly recall my first shower at Charleville in 1980  when I was despatched to fill a work vacancy at the hospital there. The absence of a hot water  tap made me wonder at first, then I realised the temperature was fine as is, for a shower. The smell of sulphur was the killer at the time which left me thinking unless you were on tank water for showering we would all smell the same so don't worry about it. I very quickly got used to the water out there.

This piece is titled "Desert Water" showing there is water in a desert, and channels run through it when it rains. 

Now, just to show you my mind sometimes gets away from drought. After I made "Storm Clouds at Longreach",  I made this small 10" x 12" piece titled " Irish Skies"    I like the formation of the horizon in this piece. It was the first piece in my Tracks series where I used 2 different "blade" colours. I went onto make " Desert Skies" after this piece. All of these pieces hang in our lounge room, with only the Desert Water being recently exhibited. I did read somewhere about keeping the artistic pieces that give you most joy in your life, hanging where you can readily see them. Maybe I need to add an extension onto our house as I could add a few that meet that criteria. Do you have some favourite works that give you much joy? I hope so.