Nauru is another one of those countries for the geography buff. Here's a hint, it is near Kiribati! It's near Tuvalu ? North east of the Solomon Islands? Okay, its somewhere in the south Pacific way north of Australia. Unlike many of the island nations, Nauru is essentially one potato-shaped island, not that you could easily grow potatoes there because there is very little arable soil especially after the industrial era plundering at the hands of the British Empire. What the country had a lot of was phosphate rock likely from eons of sea bird droppings, which could be converted into fertilizer and animal feed back in the United Kingdom. By the 1990's the phosphate rocks were depleted, leaving nearly half of the island uninhabitable. In the painting you see the rock-pillar formations that were the result of cutting phosphate rock from the land, which led to sand erosion. Indigenous peoples still live there, thousands of years and counting, surviving on fishing and a close relationship with Australia.
The painting is a fairly standard birds-eye view, maybe the bird is looking for somewhere to drop some guano? I liked the contrast that the rock formations created with the swooping S shape of the beach and the otherwise pastel colour scheme. There seems to be endless ways to paint island scenes that include sea, beach and green foliage.
World Inspired Landscapes: Nauru, watercolour 9 x 6" watercolour paper, June 2024 (No. 3860)
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