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.

24″x18″ Oil on artist’s board mounted on beeswax finished Tasmanian Oak floating frame. Price $1,475.