"Always There" Painting

I was born in Melbourne in 1971 and grew up in a house that smelled of oil paint and turpentine. My father was a painter, and though he never once tried to teach me, I spent my childhood sitting near him while he worked, absorbing the way a serious life could be built out of paint and quiet.

I came to painting in my late twenties, teaching myself from scratch. Even in those first months I sensed something hiding in the loose backgrounds I was making. It has taken me thirty years to learn how to finish them. My paintings now stand on those grounds, half accident and half intention, made somewhere in the middle where the paint and I meet. That middle is where the work takes its name: The Middle Country.

These days I paint the one thing that actually means something to me: my family. The figures and the cockatoos are all of them, painted over and over in a glowing, uncertain landscape. The mystery of being alive, and the conviction that whatever real happiness we find must come from within.

I have painted full time since 1998 in acrylic on board, and my work is held in collections across Australia and internationally. It has all been one long road.