This is a backdrop for the Rose Bay Convent Centenary Ball, for the Sydney Town Hall. This is a 12 x 4 metre canvas, and the great value of this project was that it gave me an opportunity to see how to paint large canvasses.
To find out about this I went to the Sydney Opera Company’s workshop in Surry Hills and talked to their scene painters to find out how they paint their backdrops; they mainly tacked them to a wooden floor, walked over them and painted them with long handled brushes with dry pigment mixed with warm rabbit skin glue. Due to my lack of space, I was unable to proceed with this method, so I projected the image of the school and gates onto the canvas in two sections.
The overall painting took three weeks, and the canvas was made with eyelets all the way around it and specifically sewn up and prepared by the sail maker who makes the canvasses for the Opera Company.