No Line Between Us

No Line Between Us

We spend our lives believing we are standing apart from nature, watching it from the outside. But we came out of this world the way a wave comes out of the ocean, and there was never any line between us at all.

This is one of my Middle Country paintings, the cockatoo and outback series at the centre of my art. It comes from a poured ground, half accident and half intention, colour left to find its own shape before I meet it, and the rest is painted loosely and without second-guessing.

I keep returning to the idea that we live always somewhere in the middle, never fully arrived, never fully gone. This one sits inside that space, an open cage on the edge of a hillside and everything already gone into the sky.

Painted in acrylic on MDF board. Ready to hang, with a certificate of authenticity included.

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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.