The Graduate

The Graduate

There is a moment when everything you were taught falls away and the only thing left to do is step out into the unknown on your own. It is equal parts freedom and freefall, that first walk toward a horizon nobody prepared you for.

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, the step taken out into open ground with nothing settled yet.

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.