This image began its life on a smooth optimistic blue canvas.... all sky ...with various leaf characters sailing in it. After some days, I realised that i needed something ... a deeper space, ... without which the characters had nothing to breathe in ... no song.... nor dance.... I discovered a line ... the horizon line, and this gave the image the breath it needed...

As with many of my paintings, this work began gently, in good taste, and ended in something that raised eyebrows from familiars at the time. It was part of a huge show at Blaxland Gallery in Sydney, 1993. The gallery closed its doors 12 months later, after 70 years of service to Sydney because of the financial recession. I poured myself into the struggle of this work over several years, and it is still in my personal collection. A visitor to this show, from Spain, wrote in the gallery book.... " Eccentrically dangerous. Spain would love your work". I wish it were so here in this country. Despite having held 15 one person exhibitions here, I have not once had a review from an arts writer in the media.

this painting is taller and wider than i am. by a notch. it began in the garage studio in wentworth falls... and moved down to mittagong, where several years later it was reworked. i forgot to mention that it was exhibited in sydney in 1990, featuring on the invitation at barry stern gallery. but this was not the end of its shaping. it featured again in the 1993 blaxland show in its revised state alongside so many other works on this website. i look back from here in 2011, and feel a little pride in the work i managed to squeeze out back then. i remember receiving several concerned letters regarding these works from various folk who expressed concern for my mental condition. anger was a key word in this concern. wow. "a train crash" was one response to this work. how far away is this from the music i felt in it?

I remember being in an old 1940's two storey brick boy's home, "Challenor', set amongst huge paddocks. This was my studio for two years and was working towards an exhibition in Newcastle, Cook's Hill gallery, in 1991. I chose this image for the show's invitation. The show was sucessful in terms of sales.... though no further connections with the gallery occurred. The art world is filled with ideas and values with which I have rarely felt comfortable.

This painting was a reflection on where i had lived and drunk in the Jamieson Valley, west of Sydney, for 12 years, .... daily walking. The Blue Mountains taught me how to edit sensations as a painter. The regular mists and ancient stone crust were a stern teacher. The billions of evident years provided a context for my excursions into questions of what can be valued inside an image. And so, here is one response.. made a few years after moving to a less stern landscape. Here is a concerto of bush, ... rock, air and biology.

this painting found its shape like a river stone. rubbing and rolling in the moving stream of moments over several years. it was part of the blaxland gallery show, sydney 1993. i spent a month walking around east kakadu late in 1990. 'border store' was my abode, beside east alligator river. some years later, feeling a need to interact more with the hub of visual art, i began a masters degree at COFA. i showed this painting to my advisor one evening, thinking it would be sensible for him to see the tendency of my visual thinking. i placed the canvas on the easel and waited. after several moments and shufflings this man of similar age to myself exclaimed "you can't paint like this". he was concerned about the paint application, i think. that it would fail longevity perhaps, fall to pieces. not so. this work is perfectly intact today, 20 years later, and powerfully drenched in the mystery of this land that speaks in ancient syllables. that night i hardly slept thinking about this. a wiser person may have envisaged a rich conversation to be built around the situation, but i departed the course. why? i felt infringed upon. i sensed that my advisor was less experienced in flying the dangerous aircraft of painterly imagination than i was. he was advocating a relatively risk free zone to me, someone to whom no painting worth its salt exists without risking its demise.

This painting is spread across 2.5m .... part of a huge 5 panel mural, now installed in the Mittagong R.S.L. Unlike much of my production, this image was an easy flow from idea into paint. Why? I suppose its format is trditional insomuch as there is a clear indication of vast space, near and far. For me the image is a map of the space between where my 2 children were born and still lived with their good mother, and my then abode in mittagong, separated by caverns of wild valley systems. previously, my two brothers and i trekked for 10 days with my son, then 16 years, from mittagong through the kowmung and near kanangra falls to katoomba. All this close contact was in the back of my mind in the way i scaled the land inside this work.

This small painting was commissioned for a bookcover .... a book written by a friend, Dr Robert Hillman, an enthusiastic church leader in the blue mountains. ... Back in 1980, I was involved with the Uniting church in Australia .... though a difficult ingredient in it. Within this painting I met something in myself and in the bush... the idea of bush as a theatre in which i was an actor. I loved it.... I loved this sense of interaction, rather than onlooker.... actor rather than audience in the theatre of the bush.