February 2022
This watercolour is quite different from my usual style. It is more sketchy and the washes are built up more with a mix of wet on wet and drier paint applications with gouache. It is a quick painting. The view is taken a long the Boomerang Track. The strange thing about the park’s bushland colours is its appearance of monotony – desiccated greens and ochre sandy soil – broken by varying intensities of shade and form from the trees and plants. Again a pathway leads the viewer inwards and I feel the density of bush around it draws the viewer in as you do when walking there.
This is the second vignette from my 2022 project to paint twelve views of King’s park. Before European settlement this raised land overlooking the modern city of Perth, Swan River and Cannington River was called Mooro Katta and Kaarta Gar-Up by the Nyoongar Whadjuk tribe who were who were the first people to inhabit this land.