The day I walked into the art room at Ballarat College of Advanced Education (now Ballarat University) at the beginning of 1980, an uncomfortable feeling of being an impostor swept through me like a wave of embarrassment and I became anxious about being exposed. I knew then that my paintings, with their sweeping arcs of bold color held within tightly controlled lines, would look incongruous amongst canvases mostly painted in free-flowing shapes and pastel colors. Mitch, a balding man with a goatee beard, introduced himself as my art lecturer and set my first assignment: a painting on a square canvas to depict movement.

Like a child given a pencil to draw with, I instinctively drew what I loved: horses. But unbeknown to me I was also a child who, according to psychotherapist Alice Miller, “express their traumas in a painting the moment a paint brush is put into their hand.”

I then learned of a psychotherapist in the area who used art therapy with children. Upon contacting her, she invited me to see the work she did. The children’s drawings were stark, containing many symbols of their trauma. She pointed out the spider’s webs one girl drew to depict her relationship with her mother, and another child’s drawing of herself with arms raised in a gesture of surrender which represented sexual abuse.

The meeting changed my life forever, for it finally confirmed that my paintings were trying to tell me much more than I had previously been prepared to confront. It marked the beginning of unlocking secrets from the past so I could begin the long process of healing necessary to end my internal war and find peace.

Many of these paintings appear in the following two galleries:

Selected Works
Checkered Pieces

Checkered patterns first unconsciously appeared in my paintings as early as 1980. Then in 1989 I began adding chess pieces, but always only the knights. They followed a theme of good versus evil I became fascinated with. Although black or white knights - or both - dominated some paintings, I often painted checkered effects without them. By exploring this theme in my paintings, I gradually came to see evil as an out-picturing of accumulated fear.

Finally in 2000, when a friend asked me about my obsession with checkered patterns and chess pieces, I told him about the theme of good and evil, but also that I had often played chess at lunchtime with a boss in my mid-twenties. Instantly I recalled the unexpected, and intensely uncomfortable, sexual interest he showed in me one day when he called me into his office. This then consciously connected me with the sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of relatives I had trusted as a child, which was the underlying motivation for exploring the theme of good and evil. It also motivated me to confront the ‘shadow’ within me where dark and ugly things lived, allowing me to purge the experiences from my mind so I could learn to love myself.

The checkered patterns begin to break up as the experiences are integrated and I achieve greater understanding about the motives and backgrounds of people who sexually abuse children.