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Carol McCormack Australian landscape paintings home profile about gallery exhibitions stationery contact copyright media purchase travels book
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Carol grew up west of Hughenden in north-west Queensland and has lived for over 40 years with her family on a cattle property near Glenmorgan in the near south-west. Her approach to art is a product of Mervyn Moriarty’s Flying Art School which provided wonderful art education to remote areas of Queensland in the 1970s. Although she enjoys isolation and prefers to work alone, she has attended many workshops and artist camps to maintain a connection with the wider world of art. Her paintings are responses to the Australian landscape, its diversity and its biodiversity, its history and its timelessness. Carol says "I look at a landscape and it speaks to me, each place is different and the reason that brought me there is different, leading to different approaches to picture-making, different materials and different supports." Carol has been exploring the use of natural ochres in landscapes for many years and finds it very satisfying to use site specific colours and textures mixed with brilliant acrylics. She claims her colours are never 'real' - but at the time fit her perception of the nature of the subject. She says the weather and time of day give her lights and darks and colours, constantly changing the patterns. Composition, colour, unity and rhythm are the key elements with traditional form and perspective taking a less important place. Many paintings are created in 'the car studio' as she travels - she uses watercolour paper for quick colour sketches, and on longer drives paints on squares or rolls of canvas. She loves to paint on a black background, saying it creates a simpler colour equation where hue takes over from tone. Some of these 'shorthand notes' are complete as they are, others are finalised in the studio, sometimes with the more detailed addition of birds seen along the way. Carol feels an overwhelming spirituality encompassed in nature and sees mystery in the darks, excitement in the lights, stories in the shapes. She likes to travel in and out of abstraction, some paintings will be more realistic, while others are reduced to lines and patterns. Carol says she likes to think that her paintings will help people from rural and remote areas who run into trouble, so profits from sales are directed to various charities providing transport and accommodation for seriously ill patients and their families. Umcheega ---- “If you should find a path untravelled or a place unknown to you, you must travel it until you know it” Jeanne Carbonetti ---- “…the special gift of the landscape form is to answer the basic question about what we know, how we see the world dancing, and how we dance with that partner” Andrei Makine – Le testament Français --- "The clarity of this country, the transparency, the profundity and the miracle of this meeting of water, stone and light – that is the only knowledge, the first morality. This harmony is not illusory. It is real, and faced with it I feel the necessity of the word."
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