Lake Tyers Yard presents, in its left half, a view along a wooden verandah of a house. In the middle distance, towards the end of the verandah, a black dog lies sleepily in a patch of sunlight. Not immediately obvious but eventually spotted, is a small fluffy white dog, sitting and alert, its head turned and looking away to the right.

'Lake Tyers Yard' and its related work, 'Lake Tyers Yard, Boundary Trees' were drawn primarily in situ at a holiday house east of Lake's Entrance over a series of days. In each observational drawing the artist finds that what was initially concealed in the plethora of lines, shapes, colours and forms of the backyard scene, slowly revealing itself through the drawing process. There is a revelling and rejoicing in what might appear mundane and common place but contains all the wonder of God's creation. And then the act of selecting and drawing is also a process of concealing just as much as revealing as decisions are made to pick out and draw one detail but omit or skip another.

In seeking to share something of this process, the artist initially exhibited the two drawings (at the Uniting Church’s Centre for Theology and Ministry in Parkville and then at Toorak Uniting Church’s Kinross House Arts Centre) in an interim state of linear, dry watercolour pencil on paper and then, over the duration of the original exhibition, gradually applied washes with fine brushes to complete the works, slowly revealing their final state – a more full-colour tonal effect that has a greater softness or slight blurriness to the many dappled shapes. To achieve this the two drawings were displayed unframed and stretched with masking tape around the edges on drawing boards, one at a time hanging on the wall and one displayed on an easel.

Private Collection