Body and Mine

Acrylic and acrylic media on canvas 36" x 24". This is the fourth painting in what I call the mine series, based on the landscape around the opencast gold mine in Waihi, Coromandel. A year ago I had in mind a landscape with a figure somehow based around the mine but it seemed all too complicated. This pose was in some recent life drawing I'd done in charcoal and it reminded me of that idea. The underpainting has been done for some time (there's a photo in an earlier post). I used a palette knife to apply modelling paste over the top of that and finally have got around to painting. There used to be a hill in Waihi, Pukewa, (hill/mountain? I never saw it...), and it was excavated away for the gold mine and in an obscure way this is what my painting is about. In much of my work I have this horizon line which drives my main critic crazy, but it's significant to me - I'm surrounded by hills - and looking out of a window is like looking at a painting, framed, with the horizon line like this. It's only just occurred to me that it's not just standing on the edge of the mine where I see it. It's all around me.