Vignette – from where the crickets hide, 2020

Watercolour & graphite, 14 cm x 15.5 cm, framed in raw timber box frame with soft gold face 43.5 cm x 38.5 cm.

This is an Australian Yellow Winged Locust which can track its ancestry back millions of years to the Triassic.  In the heat of the Australian summer they are very visible in areas of country NSW, and they make a distinctive clicking sound as they fly, tossed on the hot, dry winds as they move across the bleached paddocks and through the wind breaks of pine trees.  They are dancers in splendid costume, dramatic and colourful.

The title for this work comes from the poem "In a Southern Garden" by well known Australian poet, Dorothea Mackellar.