Goodbye Possum!

Oil and mixed media painting inspired by the small things in life, such as the owl who sits on the power line outside my studio at night, the possum who sought unpaid lodging in my chimney only to be evicted without the necessity to lure it out with apples dangling on some rope and the snakes moving into the local area in time for celebrating the approaching Chinese Lunar New Year of the Snake, which is represented by nine fan shaped beads with a purple star tongue under the central oil painting on paper of the possum on the chimney pot. The image I worked from was captured the night before the possum man came to possum proof the entry point before the noisy lodger had a chance to get back in! The whole work has been styled into a faux Venetian mirror, which is then completed with a painted boundary line studded with hematite mirror tiles - a 2D version of my signature style borders, a technique I use on my smaller still life and landscape works as a personal identifier of my creative authorship, which I developed during the protracted lockdowns here in Victoria back in 2020/2021. The most labour intensive part of this work has been creating the mixed media owl's eyes, which are a combination of mirror, black agate, chocolate hematite squares and gunmetal hematite eyelashes, individually mounted on frosted oil slick seed beads and arranged around the mirror tiles. This work is presented on a professional artist quality linen board base, which has been framed in a simple yet elegant, custom made Italian frame.