Fiddles to Ireland!

I'm in the middle of all the paintings, and I've got two weeks to finish them. It will happen! But to get them to Northern Ireland and put on the show, I need to raise some funds, so I'm starting a Pozible Crowdfunding project. That will go live in the next day or so, and here's what I'm saying on it:

Fiddles to Ireland!

by Nicole Murray

Pledge your support to take Australian paintings on tour to Northern Ireland.

Project Description

The Fiddle Icons Project.

I'm an Australian painter, raising funds to take my portraits of fiddle players to the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention in Derry, Northern Ireland. The show is called "Fiddle Icons" and the portraits are of influential fiddle players I have interviewed and painted. The subjects include Alasdair Fraser, Natalie Haas, Nancy Kerr, Martin Hayes, Emma Nixon, Dougie Maclean and Ado Barker.

I decided to dream big and apply to have an international exhibition, and now they've said yes, I need to make it happen!

I've been accepted to show them at the convention, I'm presenting a talk on my intriguing process of working from video interviews to create paintings, finished with gold leaf. I have a ticket to the UK.

Now I need a budget to get the paintings there, insure them, stay in Northern Ireland for the conference week.

You can help to put on this international exhibition in Derry by pledging your support through Pozible. I'm focussed on raising $3300 to cover packaging and shipping the paintings, insuring them, and covering my accommodation and living expenses while I'm in Ireland for a week.

I'm planning a major exhibition of these works along with more from the same series here in Australia, so I'll bring them back to Australia.

About the Artist

I have been a painter all my life, and my work has often focussed on portraits of musicians. My first solo exhibition was called "The People of the Music" and showed drawings and paintings of folk musicians from around Australia. I completed my art training in Melbourne and my paintings are in collections around Australia and in the UK.

For the past twelve years I have worked in the acclaimed folk duo, "Cloudstreet", touring Australia and internationally. We have just completed our seventh album, "The Land of Bright Gold", and we embark on our seventh tour of the UK in mid-April. The Fiddle Icons paintings will be shipped to meet me in Northern Ireland at the end of the Cloudstreet tour, when I will be attending the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, as a painter (but I'll take a fiddle!).

More information.

You can buy the reward as a gift.

After you have paid, please email me at nicole@cloudstreet.org and let me know the name and email of the person you would like to receive the reward.

When and where is the show?

Dates: 27 June - 1 July

Where: At NAFCo, the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, Derry, Northern Ireland. (www.nafco2012.com). I'll update the info on my blog and website as soon as the venue is confirmed. (nicolemurrayartblog.blogspot.com, www.cloudstreet.org)

How will I get my reward?

I will contact everyone about their reward, once project has closed and payment has been received.

Need further information?

I would love to hear from you to discuss any of your queries. You can email me at nicole@cloudstreet.org.

Yes, we can exceed the goal!

$3,300 is the absolute minimum to make the exhibition happen in Derry. I am already investing a lot of resources and funds into the production of the works and the staging of the exhibition. Every extra dollar raised above the goal will go towards making this exhibition the best it can possibly be, with better promotion and high quality presentation.

Thank you for taking the time to read my page! Please support my project by making a pledge, no matter how small the amount. Every bit helps. I would also really appreciate you letting your friends know about the project. I'll be blogging and facebooking updates so you know how its all going.

Cheers,

Nicole

Fiddle Icons

In the middle of working on a new morris dancing painting, I went to New Zealand to attend Boxwood, a week-long workshop studying flute and fiddle, with three acclaimed teachers, Chris Norman, Alasdair Fraser, and Natalie Haas.

A concept for a show which had been simmering in my mind suddenly achieved clarity, and I have started a body of work called "Fiddle Icons". The works I am planning will be portraits of influential fiddle players and their instruments, borrowing some of the iconography of traditional Byzantine icon painting, which is mostly used for religious images. It has the advantage of being a beautiful form, features gold leaf, and conveys a sense of the subject being revered.

The Fiddle Icons series has been gestating for a long time. Its seven years since I met Peter Murphy, who paints icons in egg tempera and gold leaf. I fortuitously met him in Broadstairs, Kent, and got to spend time in his studio. The ideas in his work made such a strong impact on me, I have been keeping a little flame alive all that time, wanting to borrow some of the techniques. You can see his beautiful work here: www.petermurphyicons.co.uk

In that seven years I have also started to play the fiddle, and I wanted to revisit an older body of work when I was painting portraits of folk musicians.

At Boxwood, the concept and the process all gelled. In order to make an expressive portrait, I am interviewing my subject on video. I ask them two questions. "What gives you joy in your music?" and "Tell me about your instrument." I have conducted four interviews so far, and the emerging theme is that people become poetic and philosophical in a fascinating way when finding an answer to these questions. And it shows in their expressions.

I then parse through the video and select individual frames which seem to express my subject's personality. I'm seeking the essence of who they are as a musician, rather than a candid image.

From there, I create a portrait. So far I have done a small work of Alasdair Fraser, my first interview subject, in gouache on paper. It is a study. The final portrait will be in oils, I think at the moment, on board, with gold leaf. I may experiment with egg tempera, as the results look spectacular, but I would have to learn a lot about the medium.

The second part of the project is to paint the instrument. It may be a full painting of my subject's instrument, or it may be a detail of the part they talk about or favour in their interview. The instrument will be on a separate panel, hinged to the portrait.

The third part of the project will be to transcribe the interview, and select quotes which inform the viewer about the musician's philosophy.

A Year Without Painting

Its been a year of huge events. I spent much of the time for six months going back and forward to Townsville, spending time with my mother in the last days of her life. It was a profound goodbye, full of grace and beauty, longing and grief.

In that year without painting, I also toured with cloudstreet to the UK and New Zealand, as well as several Australian tours, and we moved house from Maleny to Brisbane.

Now the seismic changes are settling, and I'm in my new studio, about to start on an exciting new project.

Finished! The Schonell Fig.

Sculpted, muscular, complex and graceful, all descriptions of my newly finished painting, now safely with its new owners. "The Schonell Fig" is named for the bridge it stands beside, on the banks of the Brisbane River. And with that commission happily completed, I have gone to England to be a touring musician for three months. I wonder if I can get any small paintings done while we're on the road?

A temporary studio and a big painting.

Its been a challenging year for painting. My studio in Maleny was sold (along with the building it was hiding behind) and when I finally got there after a tour to clear out my gear, I discovered everything, especially my paintings, had gone mouldy. 

This month there have been some heartening developments. First, my friend Peter lent me part of his garage in which to work, and it has great light. Then, I decided to do a 3-night portrait class with Brett Lethbridge in Brisbane. Its always inspiring to work with an accomplished painter and learn about their techniques. The technique Brett taught involved a tone painting in sepia to work out all the compositional and tonal issues. I would call it a grisaille, but Wikipedia says its more properly a brunaille, as it started in acrylic Burnt Sienna. Once all the lights and darks had reached their full value, we worked it over again using Burnt Umber. And a third time using Payne's Grey. By this stage the blacks looked truly black and the subtlety was there. Then, as we were working on Arches paper, we washed it liberally with watercolours, then worked the lights back in delicately with acrylic white.

The technique was disciplined and involved good observation as well as graphics techniques. I liked it and it freed up my thinking to tackle a large commission I've had on the list for a long time, and about which I've been very blocked.

I'm delighted to say its going very well, the technique translates beautifully to acrylic on canvas in a slightly more painterly style, and here is a picture of the tone painting after 13 hours of work. There is still a bit of work left to finish the Burnt Sienna layer, but its moving fast. The canvas is slightly more than a metre wide.

Back on the Painting Trail

In the midst of painting two commissions, which is taking up most of my studio time, the final Collaboration of Maleny Artists (yup, COMA) show for the year suddenly appeared on the radar.

Organiser and gallery owner Ken Munsie devised a fascinating theme for this show. Each artist has been allotted a square of the ordnance map around the Maleny area, and asked to create a square artwork based on the little piece of geography. I picked a square adjoining the main road from Landsborough into town, and went to the site for an afternoon of sketching the layout, checking out the landscape and vegetation, and taking copious reference photos. Back in the studio, I created "The Summer Visitor" from all the collected information, working quickly in acrylics, overlaying areas of glazed and layered colours. When the image had come together, I varnished it with a high gloss combination of stand oil, damar varnish and Liquin. 

The show can be seen from Wednesday 9 December at Maleny Artworks, 50 Maple Street, Maleny, and there is an official opening there on Saturday afternoon.

Publicity, Photos and Markets!

My work on the traffic signal box at Maroochydore is featured this weekend in Sunshine Coast magazine "The Weekender". For everyone who doesn't live on the coast (sigh), the article can be found at http://www.theweekender.com.au/features_det.php?id=337, but only those who can get a hard copy can see the picture! There's an image of the box in the June entry on this blog.

This week I asked professional photographer Colin Beard to take photos of some of my paintings, and now there are some very high resolution images on my Redbubble page. Redbubble is an Australian site where you can order prints, cards and canvasses of artists' work, and you can see mine at www.redbubble.com/people/nicolemurray. If you do get a print done on Redbubble, I'm happy to sign it if we can find a way to be in real time and space together, not just in the virtual world.

AND... this weekend I am starting a market stall, where I am selling cards of my paintings. I'm starting small, to test out the market, and looking forward to having a chat to people about art. Or anything! The stall will be at the Maleny Craft Markets, in the Community Centre in Maleny's main street, on Sunday 11 October from 8-2. See you there.