Sunrise over Yarra GlenA fleeting moment captured

In future Bert will paint a series of incredible landscapes from the many photographs he has taken of the Yarra Valley.

This painting was intended to be entered into the 2020 Wynne Prize but due to circumstances he could not do so.

This is a disappointing painting for Bert, he painted on an unprepared canvas which was too small. The texture of an unprepared (gesso) canvas doesn’t make painting fine detail easy at all; and this problem plagued him throughout the process of copying the very fine details that are visible in the source image. Compounding this problem was the scale he chose – he used a 50×70 cm canvas instead of 120×180 cm size. And in addition he can see that the colors are substantially different to the source image. Some of that is due to the process of photography.