Tag Archives: primary colours continuous line

“That’s our Water on the Gold Coast”.

“That’s our Water on the Goldcoast”. Reaction by Terry when shown “Climate Change Down Under”, a continuous line drawing by Mick Burton.

Our friends Cathy and Terry, who live in Queensland, Australia, were over here recently.  I showed them a photo of my painting “Climate Change Down Under” which I featured in a recent post         Climate Change Hits Australia, continuous line drawing.

I show it again below.  Terry immediately said “That’s our Water!”.

Climate Change hits Australia. Continuous line drawing. Mick Burton.

When I painted it I simply wanted to include a shape depicting Water in blue, in contrast to the Fire in red and the Sunshine in yellow on the land behind.  We knew that Cathy and Terry lived on the Gold Coast and overlooked some moorings, but I did not realise that their waterways were so similar to my painting.

Here is a broader view of their wonderful part of the Gold Coast, which is near Brisbane in Queensland.  Their “water” is at the bottom of the map.

Runaway Bay, on the Gold Coast, showing Cathy and Terry’s “water” at the bottom. Mick Burton, continuous line artist.

When Joan and I visited Cathy and Terry in May 2013, they lived inland as I mentioned in the post of October 2022.  Cathy dropped us off in the Gold Coast for the day and here are a few photos.

Gold Coast, Queensland. May 2013. Mick Burton, continuous line artist.

Pelicans near the beach, Gold Coast, Queensland. May 2013. Mick Burton, continuous line artist.

Sunset on the Gold Coast, Queensland. May 2013 at about 4.30pm. Mick Burton, continuous line artist.

Climate Change Hits Australia, continuous line drawing.

Climate Change hits Australia. Continuous line drawing. Mick Burton.

I have been looking at using the Primary Colours in a way which uses the colour mix when they overlap.  I wanted to produce a result as effective as that achieved in my “Knight’s Tour Fragments” abstract shown below.

“Knight’s Tour Fragments”, acrylic on canvas. Exhibited at Harrogate and Nidderdale Art Club Exhibition in November 2016. Mick Burton, continuous line artist.

Here I produced a similar effect to overlapping pieces of coloured glass.

This time I decided to give each Primary Colour a distinctive shape which seemed to reflect the nature of the colour itself.  Red often represents Fire and so I decided to use straight lines and pointed angles to contain it.  Blue is a quieter colour often representing water and so I decided upon curves and flowing fingers to contain it.  Yellow can represent the sun and I thought of the outline of Australia, which includes the “sunshine state” of Queensland.

Joan and myself visited some friends of hers in Queensland in 2013.  They lived inland from Brisbane in a large wooden house that they built, which had a couple of wallabies resident in the garden.  They moved to live on the Gold Coast a few years ago, but heard from old neighbours in early 2020 that a bush fire had nearly destroyed their old house.  The street had been evacuated and the fire was apparently heading for the house but veered off in another direction just in time.  The increased number of fires are attributed to Global Warming.

Earlier this month we saw on the news that floods in Sydney were amongst the worst since records began in the 1850’s.

With all these things coming together, I decided upon Primary Colours and Australia as part of a Continuous Line workshop I did a couple of weeks ago at Harrogate and Nidderdale Art Club.

For the picture at the top of this post, I superimposed the straight line Red fire line and the curvy Blue water line on top of the sunny Yellow Australia.  This produced semi-primes Orange, Green and Violet areas and where all three Primes overlapped we have a sort of muddy Brown.

I like to think that the outline of a subject can be used to direct continuous lines into the interior which create an image representing the subject.  After completing a single continuous line over a map of Australia I realised that there was something like a kangaroo in there which I have marked in red.  Also, if you push things a little, there may be a Black Swan over Western Australia.

Kangaroo and maybe Black Swan images from single continuous line of Australia. Mick Burton.

The friends we visited have my Wallaby painting in their house on the Gold Coast.

Wallaby, or Kangaroo. Single continuous line drawing and colour sequence. Massive distance background added. Mick Burton, 2013.

Other Primary Colour things we did I will cover in a later post.