Step Ladies has since completion been exhibited at the SOAG Gallery and has achieved a position in round two of the Art-Interview Winter Competition, this involves a panel of judges and a public rating vote.

Step Ladies is one of a series of paintings that are being undertaken to experiment with my ability to take a moment in real life and transfer its emotional context to canvas. In this case the moment was observed at Newtown in the late afternoon, with two women sitting on a door step. The ladies obviously cared for each other strongly and the closer of the two was apparently distressed. My initial thought was to present a painting about this moment and to overlay the issue of a sense of lack of power in older women as they loss the power of youth.

Determining the scale of the work is always a matter of some thought, I do this even before considering composition. In this case it was clear that the two figures would play the only direct role in the image everything else would be a visual support to the concept. Size for this painting is a consideration of the impact I wanted to have on the viewer, not too small and therefore either making the painting insignificant, or too large and therefore making it a melodrama.

Next the composition. I decided to avoid preliminary sketches on paper and go direct to the canvas. The composition was quite simple and it was only a matter of how large to make the figures relative to the canvas. The composition was laid out in thin black wash strokes to approximate the location and size of the figures, plus the verticals and angle of the street level. As you can see from the layout and later figure over painting the layout was not regarded as more than a positioning marker.

The first image shows the rough composition layout and preliminary work on the front figure. The front figure is a construction based on several photos of Chinese men and my direct observation of the lady sitting on the door step. There is a deliberate effort to have the figure appear feminine while being androgenous.

This start of the painting is not particularly characteristic of my general approach. It would be rare to take a figure to this point without having worked on the rest of the painting to provide some tonal and colour balance. In this case I was certain that the painting would rely heavily on this figure and everything else should come after.

At this point the painting moved from my Sydney studio to Port Stephens, where the remainder of the painting progressed through a series of steps that placed the second figure and the scene in position. Initially the wall was to be a plane painted concrete wall but this proved uninteresting and gave insufficient emphasis to the central figures, so it became a quasi marble wall to break the solidity down and be more sympathetic to the figures.

The second figure has been quite difficult to establish in the image. Sitting as it does between the fore and background, it has to support the front figure while not receding into the background. This figure is going through a number of iterations to settle it in place. While this settling process continues the details of shoes, feet, shadows are also building to assist the composition.

This is it finally done. The feet, shoes and further work on the back figure, with minor adjustments around the wall and foot path.