Vignette – on the grass blades spread far and wide, 2019

Watercolour & graphite, 15.5 cm x 10 cm, framed in raw timber box frame with soft gold face 38.5 cm x 33.5 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 grasses in the paddocks.  They are dancers in splendid costume, dramatic and colourful.  In times of drought, these small insects congregate on the grasses in the paddocks and leaves on the trees in numbers hard to comprehend.

The title for this work comes from the poem "Dawn" by well known Australian poet, Dorothea Mackellar.