For years, a gum tree stood outside my studio window. It was more than part of the landscape — it was the beginning of many of my gum tree paintings .
I returned to it again and again. Its branches, its structure, the way it held the sky. Much of my Above the Canopy series grew from that tree — not as a direct subject, but as a way of seeing. It shaped how I understood space, light, and the quiet tension between land and sky.
I didn’t think of it as a muse at the time. It was simply there — constant, familiar, something I worked alongside without question.
Then Cyclone Alfred came through.
In a single night, it was gone.
What followed was not dramatic, but deeply felt. The view shifted. The space opened. And with it came a realisation of how much that tree had been part of my process — not just visually, but structurally. It had been a point of return, a steady presence that informed the work in ways I had taken for granted.
I found myself looking for it — in the same place, at the same times of day — before remembering it was no longer there.
There is a particular kind of loss in that. Not just of the tree itself, but of what it quietly gave over time.
The paintings have changed since then. The work is still grounded in landscape, but something has shifted. The compositions feel less held, more open. The balance has moved. The quiet is different.
I haven’t tried to replace it. That doesn’t feel possible, or necessary.
Instead, I’ve come to understand that the tree remains in the work — in the way it shaped what came before, and in the way the gum tree paintings now carry its absence.
