I began by drawing on my parents’ walls. They quickly bought me a board, more than likely to save the house.
Even then, I knew I wanted to be an artist. It wasn’t unfamiliar. My father, grandmother and great-grandfather all painted. It was simply something that felt natural, something I moved towards without ever really questioning it.
I remember watching my father paint clouds. He painted stormy skies, those heavy green tones that carry weather in them, and I would sit and watch as they slowly formed on the canvas. Something about that stayed with me.
I was accepted into art school at fifteen, among students much older than myself. Those early years were spent learning the discipline of seeing: anatomy, perspective, colour and structure, while also experimenting with different mediums.
For a period, I was drawn to sculpture. I loved its physicality, the way form could be built and held. I think that sense of structure still sits quietly beneath my paintings today.
But over time, painting became my focus and, in many ways, my freedom.
After graduating from the National Art School in Sydney, life shifted course. Illness forced a pause, and my family moved to the Gold Coast.
When I first approached a gallery there, I was told I had no talent and should pursue something else. It stayed with me longer than it should have.
It took years before I found my way back to painting.
When I did, it was through persistence more than certainty. Bruce Watling later offered me a solo exhibition, and that marked the beginning of finding my way back.
Art has never been optional for me. It is something I have always returned to, something I have always needed to do.
Sculpture may have been my first love, and I still feel its influence in the work, but painting offers a kind of openness that nothing else does. It allows me to continue exploring form and presence without the physical constraints that come with other mediums.
The work has always circled the same place. As a child, I watched storms roll in over Sydney Harbour. Now I watch them arrive across the water and hinterland of the Gold Coast. The landscape has changed, but the feeling hasn’t.
My paintings sit in that space. Not in the height of the storm, but in the stillness within it. The moment where something holds steady, even as everything shifts around it.
Years of painting have changed the way I see the landscape. I no longer feel the need to describe every place I visit. I’m more interested in the atmosphere it leaves behind, and in the quiet emotional weight that can exist within a horizon, a cloud or a solitary tree.
Life brings its share of movement, difficulty and change. The work doesn’t tell those stories directly, but it is shaped by them.
These works are intended to be lived with. To bring a sense of stillness into a space.
Not as something that demands attention, but something that holds it quietly, over time.
