The Pleasure Of Making The Picture
Artists Palette|No 171
Here is a hobby artist who began to do oil paintings in her thirties. She now uses paperbark and oil paints in an innovative combination to create charming and captivating pictures.
Trevor Lang
The Pleasure Of Making The Picture

Beverley Doak lives and works in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, but she originally came from New Zealand. She attended art classes to learn oil painting; but admits that her skills with paperbark are self-taught.

Where paperbark is concerned, she is passionate about the fact that it is a living organism.

“In the pictures I create, the natural feel of the paperbark never goes away,” she says. “It never ceases to amaze me, the variety of textures and colours in the bark. The way I do the pictures, I really do not need to use very much bark. I utilize it as if I am painting, mostly applying very small pieces with tweezers. Painting the backgrounds is new for me … but when it comes to my eagle paintings, I feel that the paint complements the paperbark.”

Beverley’s eagle pictures certainly look very impressive on the wall. She insists that patience is a key element.

“At times it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Picking the right piece of bark for a piece of the picture is important, as I do need to look at the texture of the bark and get a piece that would be the closest to the actual thing I am painting; for example timber, concrete, wool, or whatever.”

This lady likes using oil paints to combine with her bark pictures, because she finds that oils are more ‘moveable’ than acrylics.

This story is from the No 171 edition of Artists Palette.

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This story is from the No 171 edition of Artists Palette.

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