“Scholar Stone”, 1996

James Brown

“Scholar Stone”, 1996

Oil, encaustic with "Liquid Light" emulsion on canvas, 60 x 80 cm

I was hiking with a friend on the “Many Peaks” mountain trail at Pallarenda in Townsville (Australia) when I found this baby-sized remarkably lovely rock. I looked at my friend hoping that he would sling the boulder into his backpack to save me carrying it as we had only progressed a little way into the hike. But, sigh, he advised me that if I wanted the rock, I would have to carry it myself (lol). Needless to say, because of the effort involved in lugging it back to civilization, this rock is now very significant to me.

My approach to painting it was to use an outer border showing, in a blurry suggestive way, the bush setting where the rock was found. The subject matter shown in this border was painted in oils but below the brushstrokes I first laid out the image using a photographic emulsion (“Liquid Light”) that is applied wet and allowed to dry before using a darkroom enlarger to “turn” the canvas into a large photograph. The composition of the border image was designed to fit with the attributes of the Foote, Cone & Belding Grid (viz., a left-to-right transition from objective to subjective and a bottom-to-top transition from temporal to spiritual pictorial attributes). The painting of the rock itself in the centre panel was a fairly straight-forward use of encaustic paint manipulated with a hot palette knife and employing the principles of the FC & B grid once more.

By intention the rock is portrayed from the dual perspectives wherein the lower regions of it are tactile and “rock solid” whereas the upper regions suggest an intuitive response to the rock’s form—a response feeling a bit like spiritual transcendence.