Looking north from Mt Buninyong. I like a volcano, even an extinct one, so I’m pretty happy with the number dotted around Ballarat. The one in the foreground is Mt. Warrenheip. And the title? Well, I have been painting for around 30 years, and I have been calling each painting something prosaic like Ballarat Lane XXVIII, which … More And pallid evening twines its beaming hair
Before I arrived in Australia I assumed I would go straight to the desert and paint the sort of iconic (to Brits at least) Australian landscape that I had seen in galleries and art books. I assumed I would need a lot of red paint. I settled in Melbourne, then in Ballarat and so far, ten years later, … More Otways
There’s probably a cool Zen way to say this, but I’m not really interested in the “thingness” of things. When I paint, I’m mostly concerned with how it feels to be in an environment, not what it looks like, and certainly not what the individual items are. These are not trees, they are patches of … More Metaphor and the thingness of things
The miners who made their fortune during the gold rush in Victoria were rare. Fortunes were made, right enough, but they were made by mine consortia, general goods suppliers, transport and post companies and, last but not least, saloon owners. When I’m bushwalking and painting out in the Goldfields I think about those miners, mostly … More Gold
A selection of images from the Broken Ground sequence. Most of these works were painted during my stint as Artist in Residence at Ballarat University in 2010. In the post-mining landscape of the Goldfields region surrounding Ballarat little remains of the buildings and mechanism involved in the Victorian gold rush. The evidence for the dramatic upheaval … More Broken Ground
The rhythm of walking through the bush: footfalls, the way the trees appear and disappear as I pass, and how the light changes, is like having a stream of music playing in my head. There is a strong rhythmic element in many of my paintings for that reason. The title is taken from Lines Written … More A thousand blended notes
art about place 