Thursday, March 5, 2009

Back to Tasmania


Pandanis at Lake Oberon, Tasmania, Australia
Watercolour and crayon
©2009 Charlene Brown




I haven’t actually been back to Tasmania, much as I’d love to see it again, but I did revisit a watercolour of Lake Oberon I painted in 1998. Somehow, what I’d thought was a serene understatement of the beauty of this rugged wilderness area was looking pretty … well, boring. In Tasmania, they pride themselves on resisting all the bad aspects of twentieth century development (by which they mean pretty well all aspects of twentieth century development, as I recall) and this has resulted in a wonderful otherworldly tranquility about the place. I didn’t want to lose that, so planned to jump the painting up just a little… But I soon realized it was too insipid to do anything with and started over. I’ve added this painting to my website, Paint Every Mountain.