Background

An artist usually isn’t made overnight. Most have to serve a long and sometimes difficult ‘apprenticeship’ before their work really begins to express what they want to say.

My fascination for painting in oils began when I was eight while I watched my father paint a small picture of Venice. The smell and texture of that painting is still with me.

During my first year of high school, an art teacher introduced me to abstract painting which has developed into a lifetime love of playing with colors and patterns. At Bendigo Teachers College I majored in art and developed a love for design and ceramics - particularly sculpturing in ceramics. While design has become a strong element in all my paintings, I also love creating sculptural relief effects using toning, layers of color and clear line delineation, and sometimes applying the paint with a palette knife.

It was at Ballarat University under the watchful guidance of Mitch Pearson that I began to learn more about the creative process. “Artists often destroy what they paint,” he explained, “and rework sections again and again - even though there may have been some interesting elements present. Don’t be afraid to pull something apart, or paint over it; it can open the way to create something which is more alive.” Mitch’s words are still with me. I often hear them over my shoulder while I paint and I am getting better (I think) at what he tried to so patiently to teach me.

Not only do I love the sensual pleasure of applying oil paints to canvas, but also the way the emerging image also draws me into a conversation, as if I am with a friend I have not seen for awhile. This conversation allows me to develop greater awareness, not only within myself, but with my external world and my relationship to it. I am often filled with a sense of gratitude for what I learn. And when the painting is finished it is as if my friend has gone away, but I am left with the memory of our time together in the new image that looks at me from the wall.

Painting Themes

For over a decade now I have been exploring the concept of duality: the opposing polarities and contradictions within nature, ourselves, situations and experiences. To explore them through painting enables me to integrate them to achieve a greater balance within my life. Shakespeare wrote, “Nothing is good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” And it is true! To change what I don’t like or see as ‘bad’, means that I have to change the way I think. This is the driving force behind my creativity: I want to become whole instead of a fragmented self split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sections. Balance for me equals the acceptance contained within compassion, enabling me to open up to embrace life rather than shutting it out. And because painting allows me to see clearly what I can only sometimes vaguely feel, the study of duality and the integration of opposing polarities is turning into a lifetime preoccupation.

Exploring this theme through the medium of painting has shown me that I can sit comfortably between two opposites by learning what each one has to teach me, and applying that new learning to my present moment experiences. And so in my paintings you will find an interplay between good and evil, peace and chaos, creation and destruction, complexity and simplicity, holding on and letting go, freedom and imprisonment, birth and death, complexity and simplicity, night and day, past and future...and more.

The theme for my March, 2004 exhibition was The Courage to... Sometimes it takes courage to see things from different perspectives, or to break old patterns that no longer serve our highest good. And it certainly takes courage to change. But perhaps the most difficult challenge of all is the courage to dance with life.

For me, painting is a challenge to find the essence of what I want to say using color and form, and the relationships between them.

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