Drawing Firewheels

About

The title of, and influences on, Drawing Firewheels for piano and toy piano, one player, come from two sources. First, the exquisitely detailed botanical illustrations of my friend, Australian artist Elizabeth Cooper, whose work is held in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, the Victorian State Botanical Collection and the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, as well as in private collections in Australia and overseas. Her drawings of the Australian rainforest tree *Stenocarpus sinuatus (Firewheel Tree), with its distinctive wheel-like inflorescences and mature fruits and seeds, shaped the work, the sound gestures and sustain pedal as 'sound brush' colouring specified notes and note groups. The second influence was Deanna Petherbridge's book, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (2010), which explains and illustrate technical drawing terms such as pentimento, grisaille, chiaroscuro, parerga, reverso, ébauche and line itself. Several of these concepts have influenced the work.