Dreaming Walter dreaming Canberra

Dreaming Walter dreaming Canberra' / triptych 100x240cm / acrylic and enamel paint/ on stretched canvas

It's total size is 100x240cm but could also be displayed as three separate paintings of 100x80cm ea

Dreaming Walter Dreaming Canberra, is a triptych landscape painting, on three stretched canvas', showing an imagined historic and panoramic view of Canberra, envisioned here, from the slopes of Red Hill. The painting view point gazes down and across the South Canberra plains over the once un-dammed Molonglo River as the vista stretches further back and wider to prominent landmarks including what is known now as Mt Ainslie, Mt Pleasant, Mt Majura and Black Mountain to the far left

The painting's structure, comprises three main panels to form the triptych and twenty-seven smaller internal, panel shapes, delineated with masking-tape techniques, with varying degrees of their painted edge definitions. This causes a kind of fracturing of the picture plain, to evoke visual ideas of transiting time, space and perspective.

This triptych was inspired by the two American architects who'd won the international competition in 1912, to design the future Australian National Capital City - Canberra.

Dreaming Walter dreaming Canberra portrays an imagined view of the real and natural landscape before the city or any construction at all, had taken place. It represents the 'pure' landscape - a dreamt up pre-colonial landscape. Here, Skewes imagines that Walter Burley Griffin, with his refined landscape-architect skills and astute visual perception could somehow envision the land as it once was, 'natural and unspoilt'. A kind of empty canvas, before he and Marion Mahoney began, sketching, drawing, drafting and finally designing their magnificent landscape-architecture vision for Canberra.

Dreaming Walter dreaming Canberra, is at once a kind of meditation and a dream about the architects visual creativity and of their alchemist like conjuring, to see-through and across three dimensional space, from afar and then to render accurate, inspiring two dimensional architectural construction plans.

Dreaming Walter Dreaming Canberra is importantly also, a sister artwork, to another multi-panelled painting made by Skewes, in 2004, titled Then Today Tomorrow link here

View from Summit of Mount Ainslie

Marion Mahoney 1911.

The central panel, portrays the main part of the of the original Canberra Plan, facing south and includes a Red Hill cameo!

Skewes' Then Today Tomorrow, was inspired by Marion Mahony's 1911, award winning and visionary painting View from Summit of Mount Ainslie. (image below) Her painting was a wide, one piece panoramic painting and one of her series of fourteen exquisitely rendered artwork/plans and drawings, submitted from Chicago, for their eventual award winning entry in the 1911/12 International. Federal Capital City Design Competition.

Marion's View from the Summit of Mt Ainslie' 1911, depicts the now famous vista from Mt Ainslie, (know today as 'Marion's View') It gazes downward, form Mt Ainslie and southward over the envisioned lake, city, parliament house, housing and suburban projects, Canberra hills and the far away Brindabella ranges. It also includes a small vista of Red Hill, in its middle left section.

View from Summit of Mount Ainslie / Marion Mahony 1911 / Ink & photo and lithographic dyes on silk

In 2004, Skewes reconstructed and equally proportioned a painting titled Then Today Tomorrow (previously Site Specific), inspired by the 1911 Mahoney original vision and then wove his own contemporary interpretations of the same view, utilising alternating, multiple panels based on Marion's painting and Skewes' own updated rectangular panel vistas, stitched into the original. It also pays homage to multi-point perspective, cubism and mid-century modular design. Then Today Tomorrow, later won a public art award and was purchased for a private art collection