The Painted Musician: Sydney to Dunedin, Hamburg to Maribor is the companion book to The Painted Orchestra .
This book tells the story about how the artist began painting musicians, became hooked and started traveling the world to draw world class musicians while they played.
The trips sometimes lead to adventures, like being on a train full of refugees escaping across closed borders, but mostly the stories tell of the excitement of the concert hall and the rigors of painting live subjects all day.
When exhaustion threatened, the artist migrated to cafes and painted the scenery from there. The book included many sketches of Maribor in Slovenia, painted between rehearsals during the annual Maribor Music Festival.
The Painted Musician can be bought through your bookseller or online from Amazon:
Size of sketches and paintings
The watercolour on the left, a close-up of head and violin, is painted on 24x32cm (9.45×12.59″) 200g/m2 paper like most of the ink/watercolour works in this book. A few of the sketches in the book are larger (30x40cm) and others are A4 (21x29cm).
Watercolours painted during performances like the small work on the right of Yuja Wang playing piano, are smaller: 15×21 cm.
The acrylic paintings and larger watercolour portraits featured in the book also vary in size. The sizes are given in the captions of each painting. Watercolour portraits are on full sized (76x56cm) Arches rag paper and are painted with archive quality paints.
Photo of the artist’s watercolour paintbox (archival quality paints made by Schminke).
Prices (all proceeds to the ACO education fund.)
Watercolour sketches: AUD300-600
Large Watercolour portraits: AUD3000
Acrylics/Oils are priced according to size and start at AUD900.
Portraits and Abstractions
Recent work, some of them semi-abstractions, which feature musicians of the Australian Chamber Orchestra are shown at the end of the book. Here are a few snippets of the paintings.
