Author: Tim Allen

After a full day of painting above Standley Chasm, Charmaine, Richard, Kate, Judith and I are walking in the dark. There has been a slight transport mix up. The temperature is hovering around zero. The night is still, clear and with a full moon. We’ve been walking for an hour or two punctuated by stops for chocolate. We pretend that we’re Scott of the Antarctic and joke that if someone drops down dead we have to keep pressing on without a backward glance (although I’m fairly sure I’d go back if Judith drops dead because she’s wearing my jacket and it’s really warm).

Then, a pack of six or seven dingos just ahead of us, ghost grey in the moonlight, completely silent (they’d been howling constantly while out of sight), cross the road and drift out of sight.  It’s a beautiful, sublime image.

We finally get back to camp around 9pm, hungry and feeling slightly heroic. However, the rest of the group have been getting stuck into the Henschke and appear not to have noticed that we’d been missing.

(from the catalogue for ‘The Larapinta Exhibition’, Defiance Gallery, December 2011)

On the rim above Ormiston Gorge,West MacDonnell Ranges, trying to produce a large multi panel drawing while working plein air (photo taken by Alison Mackay from the base of the gorge).

  The same location, from my vantage point, looking straight down to the valley floor. It turned out that a six panel drawing was a bit ambitious within daylight hours, so I found myself working on it by headtorch light back at the campsite.

It needed a few touches back in the studio but retained the essence of the plein air work.

Painting above Standley Chasm, West MacDonnell Ranges, June 2011. Painting fast because a) that’s how I paint, b) the light was going and c) it was freezing. The two studies completed from this spot are below.

This trip to Central Australia formed the basis for a body of studio work over the next four or five months. In some cases the studio work had a direct relationship to the plein air studies…

‘Above gorge country I’ 80 x 109cm Oil on primed paper on canvas 2011