Watercolours

Garden watercolours

Boat shaped garden with tea tree and two grass trees. Watercolour on rag paper. Last Saturday we made a wire corral that turned out to be boat shaped to protect the tea tree (leptospermum) from getting it’s bark gnawed by feral deer. We planted two grass trees (xanthorrhoea). They will take a long time to grow. Watercolour on paper

A book of Conice frustum basin designs

The templates I use to make basin forms are generated from a Conic Frustum, or truncated cone. In the series “containers for borrowed views” I derived the templates from conic sections, but warped the clay to allude to the heat distortions in galvanised iron basins salvaged from our south coast holiday shack that had been destroyed in a bush fire in 2009.

In this new series of basin designs I am further exploring the interior exterior relationships of patterns that traverse the surface. The hyperthetical transparency of the basins in these paintings enables me conceptualise continuities of surface and the paradox of the infinite panorama in a turning but closed circle.

The translation of water colour on paper to a ceramic surface presents particular challenges in terms of the glaze and pigment palette. A graphic response with scraffito though slip may be enhanced with underglaze stains. On the other hand the on glaze painting of pigment onto a white glaze presents similar conditions of immediacy and fluency that water colour on paper asks of the brush.

Toni Warburton Artist, Watercolour, Basin Designs

Basin design. thicket tangle pattern. Watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design, grids and shapes pattern. Watercolour on paper. Conical frustum container shapes.

Feral situation. Study for a container form for PSP.doc group project show coming soon to Articulate Project Space.

Pattern for a basin, watercolour on rag paper. Thinking about making conic frustum basin shapes from different media for psb.doc.

Idea for a conical frustum shaped basin with ‘mountain path’ pattern. Watercolour on rag paper.

Powderhulk Bay blues: a boat pattern for a basin. Watercolour on paper. (Conic frustum container forms, ideas and work in progress).

Pictorial heading towards pattern, rock pool trope. Watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design, small birds in a thicket pattern. Watercolour on rag paper. Thank you Patsy Hely for the beautiful brush.

Basin design. Scatter pattern of conventionalized leaves. Watercolour on rag paper. My grandmother, E.M. Warburton (nee Beavis), a respected china painter and exhibiting member of the Arts and Crafts Society, used to refer to her designs adapted from nature as ‘conventionalized.’ I have always liked the term.

Pictorial heading towards pattern, vista vignette. Watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design, cloud pattern, water colour on rag paper.

Basin design, abstract pattern, watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design, chicken wire pattern, watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design, wind and black swan on field pond pattern, water colour on rag paper.

Basin design, black swan and wind on field pond, pattern, water colour on rag paper. Water colour pigments painted with sable brushes on this thick textured paper absorb and flow a bit like on a textured ceramic surface.

Basin design, black swans in wetland, pattern, watercolour on rag paper. Thinking about Ancient Egyptian frescoes of marshlands and water birds.

Another basin design, black swan shapes through reeds, pattern, watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design. inside /outside pattern. Water colour on rag paper. (Almost at the end of this book now)

Basin design, garden beds, pattern, watercolour on rag paper.

Basin design, lockdown backyard pattern, watercolour on card. Fiona Holley and family cooking dinner under the stars. Costume designer Fiona Holley has done the machine sewing for these frustum basins.

Another book of Conice frustum basin designs

Basin design, lift in an apartment block with no balconies pattern. Watercolour on cartridge.

Basin design, underground carpark pattern. Water colour on cartridge paper.

Basin design, rockpool nostalgia pattern. One day I will be able to get across to the coast again.

Basin design, George Rignold’s Swimming Pool pattern 1, water colour on smooth paper. My brother and I learnt to swim in this oyster encrusted tidal rock pool. Our family lived in a boatshed beside the pool until I was six. Our parents spent their weekends working on the excavation and build of their modernist house up the hill. The land was subdivided from the estate of George Rignold, Shakespearean actor and entrepeneur. Rignold had engaged Italian stone masons to construct the sandstone pool as well as dry stone walls around his estate on Gayamaygal land on Middle Harbour.