A Good Place To Land

A Good Place to Land

Some places just tell you the searching can stop, and she knew it the moment she sat down.

A tall ochre and orange rock face rises out of a pale lavender sky, its surface flecked with orange and turquoise spatter. Golden trees grow out of every ledge and crevice, thick with sulphur crested cockatoos, some perched deep in the foliage and others dropping through the open air with their wings spread and crests raised. High on the left edge a woman in magenta sits with her legs over the side, one cockatoo settled beside her, looking out over the whole drop. Magenta and purple birds slice across the rock at speed. Below her the stone cools into blue and white where water seems to run down through it, and the gold trees gather thicker toward the base.

Original acrylic painting on board, 60 x 40cm. Sold unframed and ready to hang. Part of The Middle Country, an ongoing series of luminous imagined Australian landscapes, painted in my Brisbane studio and shipped worldwide direct from me.

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I grew up in a house that smelled of oil paint, watching my father work without ever being taught. Thirty years on, my paintings stand on loose, accidental grounds, half accident, half intention, made somewhere in the middle where the paint and I meet. That middle is where the series takes its name: The Middle Country. My cockatoos and figures are all one thing, my family, painted over and over in a glowing landscape, with the conviction that real happiness comes from within. Painting full time since 1998, Brisbane, Australia.