Very early on my father put out the fire that might have germinated the seed when he, like so many parents, admonished me for wanting to become an artist. Artists only become famous after they die and never make much money from their art, he was quick to instill in me. I only ever saw him paint once. When I look back, I wonder whether our lives would have taken a happier course if he had pursued something which had meaning and passion for him instead of becoming a life insurance salesman, where it seemed to me that he sold his soul for money.

Thankfully an art teacher during my first year of high school introduced me to abstract painting. It opened up a whole new world beyond still life and landscapes, and engaged my brain in a more creative way. But when I later went to teachers college, I majored in ceramics instead of painting. It wasn’t until I was asked to teach an adult painting class years later (because someone heard that I dabbled in painting) that a passion to paint began to stir.

I can thank my adult students for that because they wanted to paint something other than landscapes. I guess you could say that they became my teacher, for I then had to teach myself what they wanted to learn. Looking for inspiration, I was particularly drawn to Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Braque, Klee and Robert Delaunay.

Picasso had the greatest impact on me at the time. The distortions of form, the geometry, lines and shapes balanced by color, the mathematical problems of cubism needing resolution, all appealed to my intellectual side and began to clear away a heavy fog that had settled into my brain where I was lost with no direction in life. I started painting again. Life began to stir within as if I was awakening from a long anaesthetized state.

Inspired to learn more, I enrolled to upgrade my teaching qualifications to a Degree in Education, majoring in painting. Design began to play a more important role in my compositions, answering an inner call for symmetry and balance. Under the watchful guidance of my art lecturer, Mitch Pearson, who said, “Artists often destroy what they paint to create something more alive - even though there may have been some interesting elements present,” I learned more about the creative process and to become a little more bold and daring, and sometimes even spontaneous.

Painting in this way, rather than skillfully copying a scene, draws me into my feelings and imagination and life becomes a journey that constantly unfolds in surprising ways. What will I discover as I paint? If I put a shape here rather than there and intersect it with a line, what emotion will it evoke? What new insight or understanding will come?

After Picasso joined the communist party he was recorded as saying "I am very pleased to say, in fact, that I have never considered painting simply as an art form for pleasure or diversion. What I wanted was for design and color to be my weapons to penetrate further and further into man's consciousness, so that this knowledge can lead us a little further each day on the road of freedom..."

This has also been true for me, for art has served me well on my journey towards self-realization.

An empty canvas teases me to make visible that which I cannot see with my eyes alone. My paintings have revealed a huge source of inner knowledge (as well as family secrets). They allow me to make connections where before there were no pathways to do so. I learn about cause and effect and see their interplay in my life looking back at me from the canvas.

When I was a child I put my creativity into a box and forgot it - like so many other children, I learned as a teacher. Each time a painting integrates what I know with what lies sleeping inside me, I come a little closer to dissolving the walls of this box...and finding freedom. To this end my writing has played an integral role, allowing me to sift through and make sense of the vague feelings that stir into consciousness when I paint. 

My goal is to finally awaken the artist who still lies sleeping within me. When I go to exhibitions or look at paintings in books about artists who inspire me, I see the gift I would like to leave behind. 

History of Exhibitions

1981 Exhibited at Skipton Art Show (Australia), winning two honorable mentions
1981 Solo exhibition at Louisa’s Restaurant Gallery, Australia
1982 Exhibited at Skipton Art Show (Australia), winning one honorable mention
1982 Completed two commissioned paintings
1989 Exhibited at Gallery 917, Lake Worth, North America
2000 Exhibited at Marina Gallery, Whangarei, New Zealand
2003 Joint Exhibition with Geraldine Leonard at the Maritime Museum, Auckland, New Zealand
2003 Completed one commissioned painting
2004 Solo Exhibition at Quay Park Medical Centre, Auckland, New Zealand
2004 Completed two commissioned paintings
2010 Completed one commissioned painting

Most of my paintings and drawings are in private collections in Australia, North America, Russia, and New Zealand.