“Sydney, South Head”, 2019

James Brown

“Sydney, South Head”, 2019

Watercolour on heavy wove paper

Size: (sheet) 42 x 29.7 cm; (image borderline) 21 x 21 cm.

Life is sweet when you discover a painting that you had forgotten about. This is the case with this watercolour based on a photograph taken from the Manly Ferry on the 20 min trip from Circular Quay in the city centre of Sydney (Australia) to the outer suburb of Manly.

Out of the many beauty spots of Sydney are the outer reaches of the natural harbour called the Sydney Heads. I believe (but may be wrong) that the headland shown here is Sydney’s South Head. Whatever its name, the headland is exquisite in terms of painting potential.

From a distant memory of making this painting, I intended that the spatial intervals between the waves should link in with the Fibonacci series of numbers (viz. the closest wave to the headland was the measurement for the first interval, the next interval was a doubling of the distance away from the first wave, the next was three times the distance from the second wave, the next in an ongoing sequence of adding the previous number of intervals together was five times the distance from the third wave so that the sequence followed: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on). Certainly, my understanding is that only the front of a wave is dark while the backside of the wave reflects the sky (or what’s to be reflected above the water).

Now that I look at the composition with the hindsight of passing years, I can see that the arrangement of the headland in the composition is truly a psychological self-portrait of an introverted “loner”. The only hint of welcoming lines into the pictorial depth of the scene are the traces of converging darkness (I’m not sure if I should call them lines) that span the gulf between the foreground and the distant wall of rock and offer the suggestion of a pathway into the image.