Burleigh Beach Cockatoos Print

As a child I had a fascination with art. At 15 I made a camera with which I used to photograph star trails. At 18 I got a job as a photographer in a science department at UWA. This led me into exploring graphic art, tone drop outs, solarisations, lino cuts and then into silk screening. In my twenties I travelled to Bali and visited a number of Batik art studios where I was able to watch them in the entire process in their home based businesses making batik fabric and silk screened t-shirts. On my return to Fremantle, Australia I began silk screening leggings and t-shirts and sold them at the local markets. Then I moved to the Gold Coast where I learned to cut stencils and print them onto vinyl which I could stick onto metal panels and a range of objects. Then I began experimenting with doing portrait posters using mixed media such as photography, Photoshop, acrylic paint and stencils to print onto metal, canvas and t-shirts. Then I became obsessed with painting landscapes with acrylic paint on small canvas panels. When it became too cold to paint in the studio in my garage I moved back up into my apartment and got stuck into drawing detailed sketches of rocks, mountains, and buildings, in a rural landscape – at first in pencil and then with pen and ink. I have always been fascinated and inspired by the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, particularly that of Alphonse Muche, the Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist who lived in Paris and became famous for his poster art in the 1920’s. In 2023 when I decided to go commercial and sell my artwork this brought me back into integrating all of my art skills into a mixed media type production that could be imported into a Photoshop file for upload to an online Print On Demand website. In Photoshop I create my own brushes to emulate an acrylic or oil brush look. This takes a lot of work but the result is very satisfying and most importantly to me it is the result of my own creative inspiration.