Seduced by China!

Well before I could actually get on with the Memories of Vanuatu series China has taken over my mind! I think I will try to create a little balance between the 2 countries and work on them side by side. I want to thank Gabrielle Cordioli for his magnificent transformations of my art to vector diagrams. He did a fabulous job on the Impressions of the UAE" series. I now want to learn the process of turning my art into vectors, as Gabry has done. Santa kindly authorised a download of Adobe Illustrator and I am now embarking on a new learning curve! When will it stop! Have decided to work from B&W drawings and put the colours in later for some of these Chinese drawings. Here is the first and it is based on the Chinese Opera masks. It is not perfect and I am sure there will be some further renditions of this theme.

Memories of Vanuatu Series

Since completing the Impressions of the UAE series I have decided to work on some "Memories of Vanuatu". We spent a year in Port Vila in 2006/7 and it was a wonderful warm and happy place to be. Lots of swimming, snorkelling and friendships that will last forever. Here are the first 2 pieces of my memories of those happy times - more to come soon!

The first is called "Flippin Out in Vanuatu"

This one is "Harbour Swim"

Impressions of the UAE series

Well it took a while but I have finally finished my "Impressions of the UAE" painting series. The paintings were finished a couple of weeks ago but the vector diagrams have just been completed and they are all now looking pretty great I think!


I have placed all these designs at 2 print on demand websites. That means that anyone can go to the websites and order calendars, gifts, cards, mugs - even baby bibs and barbecue aprons!

There is an Aussie website and an overseas one. The Aussie one does not do gifts but does a great job on calendars and cards and framed prints. Here is the link - Cheryl Malloy on Redbubble.

The overseas site posts to any country in the world including my favourites - Vanuatu, the UAE and China! There are heaps of nice gifts and cards, calendars and prints to buy! Here is the link - Cheryl Malloy on Cafepress.

I would love it if you could buy some of the gifts, and better still get your friends to buy them as well!

Camels returning to camp at sunset

Memories of Arabia would never be complete without camels! It is nearly sunset and these camels are heading back to camp

Third pic in this series - Ramadan moon

Here is the third pic in this series - I am moving away from the original quite a lot with much heavier colours and less people. I think I'll try to move back in the other direction a bit. 

The woman is serving dates and tea to her family out in the dunes as the moon rises behind her. It is Iftar, which is the prayer time as the sun sets and the fast is broken during Ramadan.

Ramadan concludes with the sighting of the new moon and Eid is celebrated - this brings an end to fasting.

I realised I didn't put an explanation of the other 2 pieces so I will briefly revisit them.

This pic is about an Emirati wedding. The Bride and the groom are the central figures. The Grooms mother looks on in green while the parents and sisters of the bride discuss the groom and the arrangements. The colours used depict the very colourful women's wedding ceremonies while the men stay dressed in their traditional white. The background colours are those of the sand dunes near Al Ain in the eastern UAE near the Omani border.

These men are drinking coffee. It is almost a national pastime in the UAE. The coffee aromas are represented by the band that unites them.

Arabic Art - Memories of the UAE

I am holed up in my apartment in Nanjing with a very sore foot! Plantar fasciitis or a heel spur - or both - VERY PAINFUL! So I have started a series of paintings based on the drawings I mentioned in my last post. These drawings began to emerge at a painting session with Marion Davidson. Thanks Marion for your guidance and support and your encouragement to persist with them. I like them and will keep working this theme for a while and perhaps even see if they can be published as cards or postcards.


Please leave a comment to let me know if these paintings are commercially viable in your opinion!

Busy little globetrotter!

Since I posted the last article I have moved to China. After Vanuatu we did 2 years in the Middle East - United Arab Emirates - so I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog. Quite frankly I am getting a bit excited about this whole art thing so I am going to skip very quickly through those two years and just put up the paintings I did while there.

The first 2 pieces were inspired by the Moroccan style mosque near the Al Jimi Mall in Al Ain. I liked the geometrics and the colours. I am really attracted to this type of work.

I decided to apply the same principles to drawing flamingos. I don't like the product - it is clumsy and grubby, but I am learning about line and flow and colour and paper - so I have put them up and I will rework them one day to be more in line with my vision for them.

I had never painted people so one evening at a group I joined for practicing art I copied this lady from a magazine. And then on Mother's Day in 2008 when I was really missing my sons I painted the young boy knocking on the door to visit his mother. Because I was in the Emirates he is dressed in local costume.

There are a couple of people I want to thank for their input in the UAE. Rebecca Tilley, a young Australian woman who was teaching art at a school, had painting evenings where we went to her home and she gave us some lessons and left us to do our thing. They were lovely evenings and I really enjoyed them. Bec is also now in China and we are still friends and will collaborate more on art over our time here. Marion Davidson inspired me to begin a series of drawings and as time goes by you will see just how important her influence was. Thanks Bec and Marion, your love of art has inspired me to continue.

Starting in Vanuatu

I had the pleasure of meeting Faith Hodder in Vanuatu. Faith is an accomplished artist working in silk and watercolour and also (I think) in acrylics. Faith will never know how much she inspired me (unless of course she reads this blog!) I met Faith through a mutual friend and she mentioned that she was an artist and invited me to come and see her work. As the evening wore on I thought she is just a person, an ordinary everyday busy Mum type, not at all like the picture I had of an artist (the bohemian in an attic). That picture was someone who was not Faith, not me and really not like anyone I know. I think I thought 'artists' were extraterrestrials or something! Anyway I did not count myself as one despite having done courses in pottery, folkart, watercolours and pottering around with sketching and doodling on and off for all my life. I never got serious about it - never really turned it into a discipline as I had with my work and my mothering and being a wife.........you know what I mean........well you do if you are a mother, wife and worker!

So anyway off I went to Faith's house to visit and see what her work was - and I was just bowled over. She paints the most fabulous vibrant and colourful water pictures - seascapes of the coral and the fish that live in and on the reefs of Vanuatu. She paints with dye on silk and it is a joyous celebration of what Faith sees in her surroundings. It fills you with a love of the Pacific and the beauty of Vanuatu. She also paints street scapes and flora and probably a whole lot more but I only got to see what she had to show that day. I was in awe. And then she said something that floored me. I can't remember exactly what it was but she spoke about her work not being perfect, about trying hard to work on her style, about not knowing initially what she was doing and going through a phase of experimentation to get to where she is now. She also mentioned that she was still developing and that she never had enough time to do the paintings she wanted to do. She actually led me to believe that she was on a bit of a quest with her art - that it had more to give her and more that she could give it. Well now my picture of a real artist is changing indeed - I thought they were just inherently good at what they do and they knew it and just sat back and produced painting after painting without too much trouble at all. I felt a door opening - I wasn;t sure what it would lead to but I thought about what I had seen and thought "I wonder if I could do that?" I am still wondering. You see I still don't have the disciplone, neither do I have the skills, nor do I know anything really about what I am wanting to do and how to go about it. I went home from Faiths and decided when I get the time - you know "when I get a round tuit" - I would try to learn to paint. 

Anyway prior to leaving Vanuatu Faith also delivered another dose of inspiration. She told me she was having an exhibition of artists who have never exhibited before. Faith said that many people had the same reaction when meeting her and they would say "love your work, I really wish I could paint, I have often thought about it but never really done it......". So being a woman of action Faith decided she would put together an exhibition and that meant putting the hard word on all those "woudlbeesiftheycouldbees". She gave us some lead in time and was a hard task master - calling or emailing every little while to encourage us - and threaten death if we let her down! So, simply because she now terrified me, I did a piece of work in watercolour. It was a pair of flippers on a pair of legs, diving into the ocean and it was called "Flipping Out in Vanuatu". I sent it off and placed a price on it and then I disappeared off to Australia just knowing that when I got back it would have been returned to me and I could probably put it up behind the loo door and dream as I contempleted my life each morning. Well, blow me down, someone BOUGHT it. They actually paid hard cash for it - not much - but hard cash! I had my first 'sale' of a piece of art that I actually did myself........and money in my hand. I can't tell you how confirming this is to someone who has no confidence in their abillity! Unfortunatley I was so sure the piece would spend the rest of it's life with me that I didn't photograph it or keep any record of it at all. So I can't post it here. Not long after that we left Vanuatu and I got busy again and didn't paint for some months. That is another story for another post. I will leave you here and post again soon.

A beginning

Up until now my life has been busy - I mean really busy! I have never experienced a period of time that I have not been either working or studying (or both), raising a family, and all the other things that we do as mothers and family members. This blog is written in reflection of the last 18 months - 2 years - so it might take a bit of time to bring up to date but I am determined now to record my development as an artist. 

I am now 'a lady of leisure' (but not sure for how long!) and I have decided I would like to learn to paint. Unfortunately this decision has come to me in the desert of the UAE and there are no art colleges or formal methods of instruction available to me in Al Ain, a city in the eastern region of the Abu Dhabi Emirate.

So please bear with me as I dig back into my past a little and drag up pics of some work I have done. It is interesting but maybe only to me and those that are dear to me, and maybe to a few people who stumble upon this site!