The Pleasure Of Making The Picture

Here is a hobby artist who began to do oil paintings in her thirties. She now uses paperbark and oil paints in an innovative combination to create charming and captivating pictures.

- Trevor Lang

Beverley Doak lives and works in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, but she originally came from New Zealand. She attended art classes to learn oil painting; but admits that her skills with paperbark are self-taught.

Where paperbark is concerned, she is passionate about the fact that it is a living organism.

“In the pictures I create, the natural feel of the paperbark never goes away,” she says. “It never ceases to amaze me, the variety of textures and colours in the bark. The way I do the pictures, I really do not need to use very much bark. I utilize it as if I am painting, mostly applying very small pieces with tweezers. Painting the backgrounds is new for me … but when it comes to my eagle paintings, I feel that the paint complements the paperbark.”

Beverley’s eagle pictures certainly look very impressive on the wall. She insists that patience is a key element.

“At times it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Picking the right piece of bark for a piece of the picture is important, as I do need to look at the texture of the bark and get a piece that would be the closest to the actual thing I am painting; for example timber, concrete, wool, or whatever.”

This lady likes using oil paints to combine with her bark pictures, because she finds that oils are more ‘moveable’ than acrylics.