Larry Rollier modeled for this painting with his turquoise 1976 Harley Davidson Electra-Glide motorcycle. It was such a sunny day at Cattle Point in Victoria that the bike turned all blue as the tremendous amount of chrome reflected the blue sky.
"Hear the Roar" is a painter's painting. It is all about the challenges of scale. In real life this area from mid-ear to tip of nose would normally be about six inches. I transformed this into a six food area. How do you paint a one-inch area and blow it up to one foot? The pore of a skin whose size would normally be insignificant has now become a dent the size of which a marble would leave if pressed into clay. That change of scale creates heightened demand for observation, imagination and painting techniques.
I planned my technique in order to move the eye from left to right. The ear was strictly painted with a dry brush technique. Only a little paint was on the edges of the hairs of the brush. When applied to the top layer of the canvas, if left the pores of the canvas open to actually emulate real skin pores. In the beard, I used dry and wet brush techniques. Wet brush is when a liquid medium is mixed in with the paint so that the paint glides into and onto the canvas and fills in the canvas pores. Mixing the two techniques together to paint the skin and the beard it provides a transition area. From the cheek, to the reflection of the glasses and onto the nose, only the wet technique was used to make a soft, smooth surface. The eye travels through the different textures of the face, much as a rider rides through the different textures of the landscape.
Manon Elder