'WET' is for watercolours, 'DRY' is for Pastels and 'OILY' is for Oils
...just in case anyone was wondering...
 Debra’s journey… for ‘Wet, Dry and Oily’ Exhibition
I had just finished an overseas Pastel commission when Lawrence approached me to be the Pastel artist and I thought what an opportunity.
I had 3 grandchildren under 2 which included a set of twins. Everybody said I’d be too busy but I was determined that I would stay on course and accepted the challenge.
It did mean I squeezed a lot of my work into the wee hours of the morning (I am typing this at precisely 3.51am) after having them visit all day yesterday but I wouldn’t change a thing.
So what made me choose my Theme?
A very small painting that I had recently finished, it was small but it had some punch and it had a couple of Grass Trees in it!
I loved my new colour palette and the mood it created and funnily enough it was already titled “Defiant”

I decided I would like to do several others as I love our unique Australian landscape, flora and fauna.
The next piece I did was the grass trees on the cusp of a hill with the eerie moody sky from burn-offs and without too much thought it was titled “Resilient” (there was definitely a theme starting to emerge)

This then took me on a journey of discovery as I began to research our beautiful grass trees. I found that there are at least 30 different species of Grass Trees in Australia. Our most common in the South Western corner of WA is “Xanthorrhoea Pressii” commonly referred to as “Balga”.
The other most amazing and enlightening discovery was that I had grown up believing that there were male and female grass trees which had different flower spikes but in fact they are known now to be totally unrelated with completely different DNA and although look characteristically the same they now have their own classification and are termed as Grass Trees and Grass Plants!

Having found this out I have taken it on as my mission to educate others of this fact through my exhibition. So the next two pieces are painted as a diptych each with their own title. “Xanthorrhoea” and “Kingia Australis”
Then it occurred to me that they are so much like my new set of twin granddaughters, they may have been born on the same day and both girls but they have their own unique DNA.
 
 

These five plus one more titled “Smoke among the Grass Trees”, which is also very current as we have lived with the smoke haze in recent weeks, make up my themed two metre square panel on our feature wall.
 

You might find that a few more Grass Trees have found their way into a couple of other pieces hanging in the gallery too, but the others show my journey with Pastels through the years. Each has a story to tell and I’m happy to share them with you when you come to visit.
You’ll have to visit to see how my Challenge pieces for Lawrence’s “Bird” theme and Gordon’s “Chidley Point” theme stack up…