I painted this little scene from a very old photo I took in my medical student days, which was oooohhh, about almost 20 years ago. I was in Kingaroy, a small country town in Queensland. It was famous for peanuts as far as I knew, and very, very cold. Crazy me, signed up to do a 4 week elective term in the middle of winter. Sure, you wouldn’t think of an Australian winter as being particularly cold, but bearing in mind the buildings here aren’t exactly built with great insulation. So here I was, freezing my bones off in ancient hospital quarters, built with brick and wood, no central heating, not particularly thick duvets. Cold, cold, cold. It got easily down below zero degrees Celsius at night.
One early morning as I dragged my cold self out of the front door, I saw this lovely red tree in front of the block. It’s not something I see often in sunny Brisbane with hardly any seasonal change. This magnificent red tree was something I had to immortalise in a photo. (I hadn’t started painting yet at the time, see.)
It’s now a perfect subject for a cutesy, folksy wood panel picture.
