(175) Chrissie McDonald – The Story of Our World is Told in Rocks (Australia)
(1040) Stella Pfeiffer – How rocks have grown (Switzerland)
About this Artwork
Price: $130 AUD
“The story of our world is told in rocks”. The last sentence on my selected Encyclopedia page really resonated with me. I have scrambled over rocks since childhood. Walked along beaches, in rivers and on mountains. Often collecting small interesting rocks, whether for their colour, texture, shape or patterning. I create small ephemeral installations in my house. I hold them, feel them and gaze at their beauty. Where have they come from originally? What have they witnessed in this world? How many rivers have they tumbled through? Or is it a volcano they were thrown from? So many questions, but they are not necessarily answerable. Sometimes I find rocks that are flora and fauna fossils.
Apart from my collection, I have many photographs of rocks in situ.
My watercolour painting is an aerial view of a beautiful lichen covered granite rock. It sits in Tidal River at Wilsons Promontory, Victoria. A place often called “God’s country”. Massive rock formations, wonderful bushland and magic beaches make the “The Prom” very special.
Granite is a composite of small rocks bigger than two millimeters. It is not used in building because cutting it neatly is difficult but is a wonderful addition to landscaping. As the surface is usually rough it holds moisture, enabling lichen and moss to colonize. Very slowly they digests the granite and release minerals for plants. Amazing!
My rock is so old, millions of years old! What secret stories does it tell? Millions of stories!
About Chrissie
My painting practice evolved slowly. I trained as a printmaker but painting and drawing is what I do now.
I tend to work in themes and on self-directed projects. This probably relates to my teaching background.
For most of my life I have lived near bushland and the sea with native and now an indigenous garden. I have always holidayed near rivers, mountains or the ocean. These vistas have influenced my work. In recent years I have watched the bushland around me slowly deteriorate. It is of great concern to me, informs my recent work and has become a major driver in my need to paint.
Connected to my landscape paintings is another more imagined theme. Its focus is the ancestry of our family and very much a work in progress. Many are descended from convicts and early settlers in Australia. Life was hard, but even harder for Aboriginal people. I am creating narrative works to tell some of this story.
My early practice focused on watercolour and drawing mediums. Now I work more often with acrylic on canvas. I explore colour in the real world. Not reinventing it but seeing and expressing the varieties and subtleties in different lights and seasons. The texture and shape of a brush stroke is very important to my painting style. My work is recognizable but not realistic. Often it is a compilation of many images. There is always a story behind my work. Sometimes recognizable, sometimes needing an explanation.
Link to Chrissie’s Art Aviso profile HERE
Chrissie was supplied with the following page from Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia:
Volume 1
The story of the World in the days of long ago
Where the Earth’s story is written – How Rocks have grown
About this Artwork
Price: 900 EUR
The drawing “How rocks have grown” is a graphic translation of the formation of sedimentary rock, which is characterized by a stratification of heterogeneous layers of sediment. During the process of sedimentation, organic and non-organic loose materials of gases and liquids are deposited at the bottom of water bodies or dry land. The initially loose particles become increasingly compact as a result of pressure and temperature influences and solidify into differently composed rock layers, which have formed the oceanic and continental crust with the mountain ranges over the course of geological periods.
In my work I start from the idea that each drawing line corresponds to a sedimentation layer. The line formations translate the different forces acting on each other by the heteromorphic rock layers. The denser the lines are, the greater the forces acting on them, the harder the rock is. Softer rock, implemented in loose line formations, is formed by the hard rock layers by sliding past them.
While drawing I trusted my imagination and fantasy and the picture grew out of itself. The result is a very lively, moving, abstract, imaginary rock landscape, in which it constantly pushes, glides, grows, creates, forms and reshapes. The lines, however, are not only a topography of an imaginary rock landscape, but also a topography of time, in which movement and change are constant. Thought of as a rock landscape, the drawing also offers space for individual associations.
About Stella
My main working medium is drawing. I am inspired by nature, especially by landscapes, the sky, mountains, rock formations, simple stones and many other things I find and see in my environment. In the course of time I have developed different visual languages as well as work cyrcles, on which I continue to work, develop and expand continuously. My artistic work is characterized by a wide range of diversity, because I never do the same thing too often.
I do not work figuratively, but abstractly. I usually work in small formats, process-oriented and associative. During the creative process, memories of what I have seen, experiences, imagination and fantasy play an important role in the creation of images. Each work is created on the picture carrier from the respective moment.
My drawings are characterized by tension-filled moments of movement, in which the most diverse forces manifest themselves in fragile equilibria: In terms of content, I deal with the sensual perception of reality, which is constantly changing and cannot be captured. The perception is always fragmentary, although the senses think they can recognize a whole. The “world” and that which I, as a draftswoman, perceive from it, translate into pictures and make visible, is thus a moving space-time structure on the picture carrier, which enables new, individual references and resonance spaces, i.e. extensive fields of association for the viewer.
Link to Stella’s Art Aviso profile HERE
Stella was provided with the following page from Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia:
Volume 1
The story of the World in the days of long ago.
Where the Earth’s story is written