By MICHELLE HERBISON
MARSHALL wildlife artist Barbra Gleeson’s digital camera snapped away as a 60-odd herd of elephants plodded within 10 metres of her safari tour group.
“I’ve never seen anything quite as good as that. It’s just wonderful how they look after the little ones, they keep them in the middle,” Gleeson recalled.
“Then down behind them was this great big bull keeping his eye on the females.”
The eye-opening encounter with nature was a highlight of Gleeson’s four trips to Africa in recent years.
The retired hairdresser has taken to producing strikingly realistic graphite and coloured pencil sketches and scratchboard artworks depicting the African animals from her travel photographs.
“There’s nothing quite like seeing the animals in their natural state,” she said. “The cycle of life is amazing.”
Devoid of creative challenges after giving up her hairdressing career, Gleeson focused her energies on creating artwork.
“I used to paint oils in the late ’70s and early ’80s but I didn’t have much time for it with three children when I was young,” she explained.
“When I was hairdressing there was always a creative challenge there. Now I have to feed my soul and do something creative.”
The self-taught artist described herself as a “realist” who enjoyed the challenge of producing fine detail.
“I really do like a photographic image. We’ve got some beautiful animals – I don’t think I can do a better job than the big fellow upstairs did,” she laughed.
Gleeson creates her scratchboard works on purpose-designed boards of white clay sprayed with black ink, etching images into the clay with a scalpel.
“You always do your sketch first because you can’t afford to make a mistake on a scratchboard. It’s on a black background and I can choose to leave the image white or I can colour with ink as I did for the giraffe.”
Gleeson is among local artists featured in Art @ Wintergarden’s Little Gems Exhibition until 24 February.
