CREATIVITY// An ode to the Australian sky

I’ve often pondered the sky, the way others contemplate their navels. There’s something quintessentially Australian about it.

Ultramarine. Prussian. Pthalo. Lavender. Cornflower. Indigo. Cerulean.

All monikers for shades of blue. Beautiful (in their own right), but none seem to capture the essence of the Australian sky. After all, how do you capture the feeling of a colour.  

…..

Heat on skin.

Vast. Open.

Clouds are a rarity.

…..

There’s a generator running in the background, cockatoos screeching, and the wind drifts slow and lazy across the landscape.

Behind it all, the backdrop of the never-ending Australian sky. Shining along like a sunflower reaching for the sun – unashamedly blue.

There’s no softness in its colour or intensity. Nothing like England or Scotland or France with their dappled light and grey misty mornings. Nothing like Egypt with its blue shrouded by dusty haze. Not even like the Mediterranean with its sky reflecting bright bougainvillea and beaches.

Some would call the Aussie sky harsh. Unforgiving. And I suppose for those who are new to it, that’s how it might appear. But there’s a myriad of warmth and depth in the sky.

The kind of blue that every Australian seems to know. It beats down on sheep and cattle. Burns the uninitiated, the unprepared (and anyone who has fair skin). It’s the kind of blue that makes you squint in the light. It feels warm – glaringly so. Like hot sand at the beach.

It smells like crisp eucalyptus leaves as you wander through the scrub. It feels like long stretches of highway. Unending.

It’s this blue that I think when people call someone ‘True Blue’.

It’s the kind of blue you feel in your bones. To your core.

Aussie blue.

It’s the blue of my dreams and comes alive in my paintings.

As the day darkens and the sun descends in the sky, the blue shifts from a yellow-tinted lavender to a rich ultramarine, eventually giving way to an inky blue black littered with stars. The burnt orange of the soil reflected along the horizon.

Telling tales of a cold night to come.