Porto Loutro, Crete

“This was the view across the bay at Porto Loutro in southern Crete. Whilst I prefer to paint dull or stormy skies, the colours of the Mediterranean coast were too hard to resist. I particularly liked how the foreground water and the rocky slope across from it turned out.

Painted for the Sutton Village Gallery ‘Coast’ exhibition, this was a bit of a thematic departure for me as I normally paint inland landscapes around the Canberra region and occasionally at a family farm in central Queensland. The exhibition was primarily about Australian coastal scenes but I so rarely visit the coast, and prefer to work from my own photos, so photos from around the Mediterranean were the closest I had to paint from.

The woman in the scene is my Mum – made a little more generic to keep the focus on the landscape. The hat was borrowed from a goat who inhabited one of the islands in the bay and was weatherworn and somewhat chewed but still stylish.”