About

I moved to Australia permanently in 2005 and I am now proud to call this country home. My mother was an enthusiastic amateur artist with a naturalist’s eye. Art was an important bond between us and thus in me she developed an interpretive eye as my childhood took in first Portugal, then the Seychelle Islands, Kenya and five years spent at school in Scotland. The landscape, in all its grandeur or subtlety, became an ongoing subject of intrigue for me. I was fascinated how it can be bold and unforgiving, nourishing and fragile. The variety of landscapes that I became familiar with, along with the animals, plants and people who depended on them fed this interest. Eventually the human relationship with the landscape, for cultural connection, livelihood, sustenance, exploitation, power and identity found its way into my mind to occupy my thoughts and shape the way I look at things. In my painting practice I have been occupied with the way that the landscape is portrayed. The aspects of common humanity that might have engaged me in this theme are not as important for now, instead I have focused more on the way landscape has been portrayed in paintings. In Western Art, this includes the historic struggle with creating a realistic context for religious scenes, to the breakthrough of perspective, the emergence of landscape as a genre in its own right, and the eventual rejection of devices such as perspective to challenge the mandate of depicting space as 3 dimensional. Eventually the painting becomes both a depiction of subject and notion. Either depiction can be explicit, true to life or ambiguously poetic. The feel of a place can become more important than the look, and the factors that shape that feeling can be engaging in a subtle or explicit way.

The human figure is important to me too, but it always exists in a space. The figure in context has the capacity to create a narrative that, devoid of detail, hopefully suggests to the viewer a broader story open to all sorts of possibilities.

However, since moving to the Central West of NSW in 2013 I have been totally beguiled by this nuanced landscape that is ancient, worn and weathered, and yet shaped and characterized by recent human influence. This sub text is often present, with a fence line, road or poplar tree, often unconsciously, determining which views I choose to paint. That this area has long been a source of inspiration to Australian artists is of no surprise to me.