Australia

A few years after a five-week journey wandering up and down and across Australia – from Perth to the Outback and Alice Springs, up to Darwin then over to the Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, and places in between – my reaction to this country unfolded on canvas. I’m well-travelled but Australia is the only country so far to have sparked a series of paintings.

The colours of the Outback; the browns and rich reds of the earth; the spreading mangroves and the wildlife in the parks; the strange sight of seeing Ayers Rock erupt out of the expanse of flat land that stretches as far as the eye can see; and the cities built along the waterside…all left lasting impressions. I painted from those impressions rather than photographs while I tried to capture the essence of this vast country.

But it was the prints and paintings made by the Aboriginal people in Alice Springs that inspired me most though my work is nothing like theirs. It wasn’t the dot paintings per se so much as the stories they tell (family stories that only they are allowed to share) and the trust the artists have in the process, in the natural unfolding of the marks and designs. Nothing is planned. Dots and lines are the vocabulary but placement and colours are intuitive. There were so many paintings that I wished I had done myself….