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Hello! My name is Clive Richardson, thank you for reading my profile :-)

Ever since I can remember I have been passionate about art.

At the age of 10, I won a national art prize (in the United Kingdom) for an oil painting - The Brooke Bond National School Awards (for art, essays, and creative writing), and at the age of 14 successfully sat the entrance exam for the South Australian School of Art and then at the age of 16, I won a state scholarship to attend the South Australian School of Art full time.

Art has given me a wonderful life – from meeting my wife (at art school) and making life-long friends to sell-out exhibitions, positive art critic reviews, and having my work purchased for several collections including those of the University of Adelaide, Flinders University and the Western Teachers College (now hanging at the University of South Australia).

For the last decade or so I have focussed on commission work only, however due to our relocation to Melbourne and lack of space, I am offering four of my paintings for sale.

My love of music lead me to a side career, singing opera in Adelaide Chorus and the State Opera, and this in-turn inspired me to create the paintings I am offering on Bluethumb – they each represent one of the four operas of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle. They can be purchased individually although together I hope you will agree they tell a delightful story and make a wonderful set.

I hope you like them. If you would like to know more about me, please read on!

I was born in London, at the end of the Second World War on the 21st November 1945. My parents, older brother and I moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire in 1953 where I later commenced secondary education at St Albans Grammar School for Boys. My brother began work with the same firm employing my father, Handley-Page-an aircraft manufacturer. Just before Christmas 1959 we all migrated to South Australia. Father flying to start work with his new employer, Weapons Research Establishment at Salisbury the rest of us making the month-long voyage by ship.

My first forays into oil-painting began in earnest at Primary School thanks to being one in several children throughout England to win a nationwide art competition, run by a tea manufacturer, and a headmaster who was a keen amateur artist. He’d chosen a handful of students to give rudimentary lessons to and my class teacher persuaded him to allow me to join as well. Along with encouragement from my teacher I remember the headmaster had hung around the school several quite large framed prints of famous paintings. One was a Cubist portrait of a blue lady painted by Picasso. It must have had an effect on me for I’ve never forgotten it.

I was very fortunate in gaining admission to the boys’ Grammar School because I not only received a good all-round education, I had an art master, Mr. Cannell, who was more than happy for me to work in the art room during lunch hour and whenever I could get permission to be excused from sports activities that I had no aptitude for. (The resulting paintings were included in my portfolio when I successfully sat for the entrance examination for the South Australia School of Art).

Our arrival in Australia may well have been beneficial for my father but, at the time, not necessarily for me. I attended High School in Salisbury and Elizabeth, but art was not considered an important subject and art rooms were poorly equipped. I was lucky to be helped by Gary Schultz then in his first year of teaching (later to become an art curriculum adviser with the Education Department) and given as much encouragement as circumstances would allow. I first attended art lessons at the School of Art on Saturday mornings under the tutelage of Mary Milton and in 1962 won a State Scholarship to attend fulltime.

The first year at art school was spent receiving lectures in Painting, Sculpture, Graphics and Lettering amongst other subjects. This “Common Course” was provided to enable the student to decide which Fine Art or Advertising course they wanted to specialise in. I very nearly chose Sculpture. There was at the time a dynamic Scotsman running the department by the name of Alex Leckie. He made classes exciting and stimulating under somewhat adverse conditions. (The art School was then housed in the old Exhibition Building on North Terrace, Adelaide. The Sculpture rooms were in the basement which frequently was flooded during winter storms). However, I thought I had more chance of a future with painting and having received a pass at the completion of the first year I returned to take up the painting course.

The head of the painting department and our chief lecturer was Gordon Samstag. Fellow American, Jo Caddy (who was later to become well-known for her ceramic work, took us for composition. She was far more approachable, and it was unfortunate that animosity between the two lead to her resignation. Her successor was Sydney Ball, New York trained and recently returned to Australia. He was a practising “Hard Edge’ painter; he brought exuberance and vitality along with a whole new way of applying paint and combining colours. While in my second year of art school the class was given a project to design a mural far a boat showroom. My Submission was accepted and I was awarded the Powercraft Prize…I then had to execute the work full size (from recollection 12 x 4 feet (3.6 x 1.2 metres)) to receive the prize money.

A painting I’d completed for a class project “Don Quixote Charging a Windmill “was purchased for the Western Teachers College Collection. A series of changes of campuses and addresses could now find the work displayed at City West, the new University of South Australia campus.

Dora, the wife of an important Post War painter James Cant, took us for Life Drawing and Painting. Dora was then about to retire. I’d been one of her students since beginning art school. Somewhat aloof, she had me doing some good work and I very much enjoyed the subject, which showed, when I was awarded. The John Christie Wright Memorial Prize at the end of my third year.

I was one of a group of four colleagues approached to spend the summer vacation making and painting stage props’ for the 1966 Adelaide Festival production of the Play of Daniel, which lead to an association (later a friendship) with the artist Stan Ostoja Kotkowski. He became well-known in Adelaide for his Festival “Sound and Image” productions and stage sets, and Australia wide with Op Art paintings. My involvement with Stan on stage sets for several opera productions in the seventies for the Elder Conservatorium of Music may well have sown the seed of interest for my eventual membership of the Adelaide Chorus and the State Opera Chorus. I’m sure my choice of colours when painting was enhanced by my being his assistant in several of his laser light and colour slide “Sound and Image” displays.

Besides having exhibitions of new work in our new art school gallery in North Adelaide, fine art student colleagues and I regularly exhibited at the Archer Street Art Gallery close by and at the Contemporary Art Society Gallery in Parkside.

I was also involved with a small art group and class held in the evenings at a Technical High School in Elizabeth not far from where I lived. Here I befriended Phillip Pike (then working for a radio station in Adelaide later becoming advisor to the Arts Minister in Queensland) and now fulltime artist. I was also sharing a lot of my time with fellow art student and painter, and talented actress, Pamela Schulz.

At the end of 1966 I was horrified to learn that though I’d received a distinction in Life Painting I’d failed another subject Project Design. This meant returning the following year to repeat that course part-time to be eligible for the Diploma in Fine Art -which I did successfully. To supplement my income during this period I worked as a storeman in a small goods factory during the afternoons and cleaned the trucks on Saturday mornings. Pamela and I got married in August and I applied for and was successful in receiving employment as a set painter at the A.B.C Television Studios in Collinswood.

Phillip, Pamela and I shared our first exhibition at the Archer Street Art Gallery during the Adelaide Festival of Arts in February the following year and I began work in earnest for my first one-man exhibition to be shown at The Robert Bolton Gallery, North Adelaide at the end of May in 1968.

This was to be a series of paintings with the war in Vietnam (then very much on everybody’s minds) as subject matter. Looking back, it seems incredible now, that though I had progressed from painting on ‘Masonite’ sheets to stretched canvas as a preferred surface to paint on, I (along with most of the painters around me) was still using oil point in preference to acrylics. By adding varying quantities of beeswax to the paint we could overcome the tendency for the oil paint to dry with sheen.

Ivor Francis (art critic far “The Advertiser” newspaper) wrote that my vivid, highly decorative pictures were so esoteric at the meta physical level that viewers may find some difficulty in relating them to their titles. “Napalm”, “Hue Liberated?”, “Talk Peace” and so on. He continued, “It is possible these paintings are too large and too disparate in composition to sustain their intent, a criticism which would not apply, however, to the well integrated “Genocide I” and Genocide II”.

An involvement with the Anti-War movements in Adelaide brought about my desire to paint a powerful message for inclusion in an exhibition at the Royal Society of Arts gallery in the Institute Building on North Terrace in Adelaide. I’d found a photograph of a mother and a child killed in Vietnam published in an American magazine and used this as the subject and a heading in the same publication “Napalm B Adheres Better, “as the title. I’d wanted to win a prize with this painting, but was fortunate in having it purchased by Flinders University.

I was also invited to take over a Saturday morning “mature age” art class for the Worker’s Education Association-W.E.A., on South Terrace in Adelaide. There would have been a core of around twenty ladies. I was quite exhausted by the end of the four-hour sessions. Each woman was desirous of individual attention and eager for as much information and as many “handy hints” that I could provide.

Pamela’s Lutheran background and strong Christian faith gave rise to my adult baptism and a long friendship with Pastor (later Doctor) Daniel Overduin. A series of Bible Studies he presided over on the Book of Revelations resulted in a second one-man exhibition at the Robert Bolton Gallery with The Apocalypse ‘as the theme. I chose to paint far more figuratively with this show though still using simplified form and strong colour, there was also a wider choice of size of canvas. The outcome of this was requests for two more copies of the obviously greatly admired and inexpensive “Rider on a Black Horse”, which had sold early on the opening night!

Towards the end of 1969 I shared an exhibition with Phillip Pike at the Lombard Street Gallery. North Adelaide. Called “Contrast”, my contribution was a series of abstracts using tonings of only one or two colours for each small canvas. Some were painted within a circle, some not, and all quite intuitive in composition for I had no real idea in mind while painting them and no particular motive. I had a lot of pleasure working on them through to their individual conclusion. I’d given none of the paintings names so was quite astonished to learn through Phillip, that the gallery management had decided to give them all titles from musical terminology, so I did not attend the opening in protest.

A close friendship with journalist and writer Russell Porter resulted in him opening the first exhibition of my work at the “Cricklewood Art Centre”. He and his wife, Lena, had recently returned from a trip through South America and shared some extraordinary experiences on a River Amazon boat trip. Alfreda Day (the art gallery owner) introduced Russell as a famous South American art historian. Bearded, with dark complexion and scholarly air, he convincingly “carried –off” the deception in Spanish- with his wife holding up a series of cards with an English “translation”, an effusion of superlatives! Russell had also been involved with naming a few of the pictures for me. Some of the paintings were influenced by my concern for peace in Israel where there was at that time, considerable unrest. Hence – “Tanks for the Memory”, I’m Dayan to go Home”. I also exhibited a circular painting of a foetus from a photograph published in a magazine of the day which became, “Womb for one More”; a portrait of my wife Pamela and another of a mutual friend of ours ; and a large five panel picture which had resulted from my desire to translate the composer Sir Edward Elgar’s song cycle ‘Sea Pictures’ into a literal painting; are some of the works that I remember from that show, which was to my memory, sold out.

This would now be about the time that I was requested to teach at the Burnside Art Group-another mature age gathering, though from recollection not necessarily all ladies. It took place at a community centre on Kensington Road in a suburb of Adelaide, one evening a week and I remember that there was a lively response when I spent one of two of those lessons giving a practical demonstration on how I’d paint a still life.

The Skillion Bookshop Gallery in Stirling, situated in the hills outside Adelaide was the venue for a one-man show. All pictures were small, and this time painted on card and mounted behind glass. The inspiration for them came largely from landscape composition and it would have been an interesting project to have expanded on some of the ideas to create some much larger works, which was impractical with the limited hanging space of the bookshop.

However, I was able to realise the desire to paint bigger canvases with my next project, though I don’t recall the circumstances which lead to my meeting Simone Garrett (evidently an ex resistance fighter in Holland during the Second World War). She was now managing an art gallery in Tanunda some forty kilometres North of Adelaide in the Barossa Valley wine district. Die Galerie had a large hanging area on its first floor and I was offered the space for an exhibition. Some of the paintings were up to 5 ½ x 5 feet (approx. 168cms x 153cms) and in all I painted a collection of twenty works. In the main they were totally abstract, though three had human elements, “Hosanna. Heysanna” was a crucifixion scene and “For Now We See through a Glass Darkly”; a green faced profile of Pamela peered in from the left. The painting, “But Now Face to Face “was a diptych (two panelled picture). One panel was taken up with a very stylised portrait of me facing a copy of a much published print of Jesus- Hollywood style. Though the opening of the exhibition was a great success, with many visitors in attendance, it was financially a failure. I was later able to sell, for a very nominal price – three other large paintings from Die Galerie, when composer friend Ralph Middenway (then working at Adelaide University purchased “Homage to L.J.P”, “Petra” and “The Phantom Dribbler strikes Again” for the University of Adelaide Collection.

Some friends from Lower North Adelaide had bought me a stereo and one of the records I purchased was a recording of “Façade”. This is a series of twenty-one poems written by Edith Sitwell in collaboration with music composed by Sir William Walton. A work of his younger years, written a few years after the end of the First World War, the poems share with the music a rhythmic exuberance in a majority of the pieces and a quiet pathos in the remainder. Dame Edith wrote of her works “They are abstract poems – that is, they are patterns in sound: they are, too, in many cases, virtuoso exercises in poetry of an extreme difficulty) – in the same sense as certain studies of Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music”.

My pictures, all relatively small- but like the poems, full of detail – were a blending of abstraction and figurative painting. Some may have bordered on illustration (a dirty word in Fine Art terms) but I never meant to cause offence, was aware of what I was doing and was very much enjoying it. I remember “The Advertiser’s” art critic wrote about the paintings being incapable of arresting attention without the poems and the music – a criticism I strongly deny. Another critic was to, several years later; on reviewing an exhibition of my recent works write how” his faith in me had been shaken in the early 70’s”. He was referring to “Façade”. So, not appreciated by the “Establishment”, it sold better than my exhibition at “Die Galerie” and enabled Pamela and I to go and have a holiday!

During the early months of 1974 I was a regular listener to a weekly adaptation of a B.B.C production of “The Worst Journey in the World”, the story of the fateful Scott expedition to the South Pole in 1912. I became enthralled with the courage and bravery and the terrible hardships that the explorers endured. While at school, we’d read sections of Captain Scott’s diaries. My upbringing and a desire to one day, travel to Antarctica came to the fore, I knew I had to paint the story. As it was I didn’t have to wait very long.

I had a number of paintings on display in a mixed exhibition at a gallery (now long gone) in nearby by Hutt Street. Some glowing comments were made by an art critic through the gallery proprietors I was introduced to Dr. Rose Van Toussaint. She’d been in Adelaide to arrange a ceramic exhibition with the aforementioned Jo Caddy and wanted to know whether I’d be interested in sharing her art gallery space with my ex art School lecturer friend. I hastily and gratefully agreed. Dr. Van Toussaint was a Perth based psychiatrist and owner of the Collector’s Gallery in Subiaco. The gallery was purpose built and modern. It had plenty of floor space for the display of ceramics, with plenty of wall area for both large and small paintings. Jo and I spent some time planning for the event. I myself would require several months to plan and paint for my exhibition on ‘Scott of the Antarctic’.

A friend had a copy of ‘The Worst Journey in the World”, the author Apsley Cherry-Garrard, was a member of the British Antarctic Expedition. Apart from the vast amount of scientific work they were involved with, they also set-up the fuel and provision ‘depots’ necessary for the outgoing and smaller returning Polar party. I think I recall that Cherry-Garrard was one of the search team that found the bodies of Captain Scott and his colleagues in 1913.

I borrowed several books from the public library for reference purposes; extracts of Scott’s diaries and some extraordinary black and white photographs by the expedition’s original photographer, Herbert Ponting.

Wanting to paint some quite large paintings I decided upon, for transporting purposes, building them from a series of smaller standard-size canvases that could be bolted together to create the necessary dimensions and then dismantled for transportation. Eventually I had sufficient 2 foot (60cm) square stretchers made to create an exhibition (in various multiples) of eighteen paintings. The largest painting was made from eight panels and there were several single panel pictures as well. To give the paintings some atmosphere I made use of a spray gun bought with our vacuum cleaner as an attachment it proved invaluable as a means to create the feeling of freezing conditions.

With the larger paintings I gave vent to a desire to portray the immensity of the “terrible place,” Scott’s words in a passage from his diary, and the insignificance of the ‘would be’ first human visitors to the South Pole. I used several large pots of titanium white which was spread over the canvas with expressive vigour using a palette-knife. Then using the descriptions of Cherry Garrard and Scott (with his beautifully poetic diary writing) set-to with either the spray gun or a more primitive method of pouring thin colour glazes of paint straight onto the horizontal canvas (or an adoption of both methods) to try to translate with paint what the two so ably described in their writing.

I was very fortunate at the time to have as a friend who bought several of the single panel paintings as I completed them. Garry was later to accompany Pamela and I on our trip to Perth. At the time he probably owned more of my paintings than any one else.

Jo Caddy had had a bad experience with air freight. One consignment of ceramics she’d sent to a Darwin gallery had arrived destroyed. I certainly couldn’t afford to fly the exhibition to Perth, even if I’d wanted to. It was decided that we’d take Jo’s ceramics with us and be as careful as we could. She packed all of her work in padded cardboard boxes. I framed the paintings with 5cm wide aluminium strips held on by screws so I could detach them prior to dismantling the panels for transportation and then re-attach them once we’d arrived at the gallery in Perth.

We owned a 1959 VW Kombi van that had successfully taken us to places such as Melbourne and Sydney. Perth was something else! With the centre and rear bench seats removed there was quite a considerable amount of floor space. The dismantled paintings were able to be stacked to the ceiling in the space over the rear-mounted engine. This, we were later to find, gave us considerable engine noise insulation. Jo Caddy’s cartons of ceramics, our provisions, spare fuel, changes of clothes, the aluminium strips and a tent, took up the rest of the space. Gary, Pamela and I sat in the front compartment on the remaining bench seat. All quite snug! Jo Caddy flew to Perth to await our eventual arrival.

The trip, which took three days, was an epic for us in itself – though not of the magnitude of the Polar expedition. At the outset I drove, stopping only for fuel, for two days. In those days there was a significant section of highway on the Nullarbor Plain that continued, unsealed, for 350 kilometres. It was so badly corrugated by interstate heavy transports as to be all but impassable for ordinary traffic let alone our aging kombi with its fragile load. Amazingly when all was unpacked at our destination and the exhibition on the display, not one item had been damaged.

One of Jo’s ‘People Pots’- she excelled in whimsical faced and formed pottery, was later knocked down by a gallery visitor on opening night. In lieu of repayment for her consignments safe passage I repaired the said damaged item and it’s still in our possession in Adelaide.

Several years later the largest of the Scott paintings, “The Return from the Pole” was damaged in a house fire at the home of an Adelaide art collector, I was contacted to enquire if the painting could be restored. Fortunately, though the painting was indeed much darker than it had been on its completion, smoke stain was the culprit. I was able to restore the painting with a liberal amount of warm soapy water followed by a good rinse.

The following year 1976, I was again invited to share an exhibition at the Collectors Gallery. This time with a South Australian silver smith, Christopher Neave. Born in England like myself, he was the husband of one of our art school friends Cit (a talented artist and now well known for her exquisite hand painted silk scarves). My contribution was a display of mainly circular abstract canvases. I’d experimented with circular paintings before and rather relished the possibilities of not having a pre-determined position for display purposes, especially in the case of abstract compositions. I’ve always dwelt on an intuitive approach with my paintings to a lesser or greater degree. So I enjoyed being able to tilt the picture in whatever direction I wanted to ponder further ideas before the paintings completion.

Once again our Kombi was called upon for transportation only this time, remarkably, it carried Pamela and I, our eldest son Justin, then 8 years old, a female friend plus Christopher and Cit along with the exhibition material and provisions and camping gear. This time I shared driving, and this time on return to Adelaide the Kombi had two broken rear wheel oil seals.

During the year I was also involved with a large project for the then recently completed Nauru House in Melbourne. As mentioned earlier, Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski had, since art-school days been keen to promote me (even sending congratulatory telegrams for the exhibitions I was having and offering me paid involvement with his projects. He’d won a commission to construct a large number of fibreglass panels depicting the folk lore and legends of the Pacific island which was, at that time, earning a considerable income through the export of its guano rich soil. The panels were to adorn the entrance and ground floor lobby of the Melbourne headquarters. I was employed to assist in the panels’ construction and the decorating of them. A colleague of Stan’s, Vik Mednis, had a large studio on his Bridgewater property in the Adelaide Hills where the work was carried out and the completed panels prepared for shipment to Victoria. I’d worked with Vik before when we painted sets together for an early Adelaide Festival of Arts production “Jamie Green in Australia.” Vik himself was a prolific artist; a lot of Adelaide homes of the day displayed at least one of his Expressionist fibre-glass horsemen panels.

In the mid-late seventies Stan was employed by the Adelaide University’s Conservatorium to design sets for two operas, Verdi’s “Nabucco” and Mozarts “Cosi fan Tutte.” I became involved with these, working alongside Stan as well as designing and painting sets myself for the South Australian Creative Workshops productions of” Marat Sade “and “Uncle Toms Cabin”, a production of the following year when I constructed the sets and props as well. Pamela, my wife was also cast in both these productions.

Through Phillip Pike’s early connections with the advertising industry I was contacted by British Paints for a sales promotion in an Adelaide department store to paint requests from passing customers using British Paints products in a latter-day Rolf Harris scenario.

Caroline di Fazio, a fellow student from art school days had opened an art gallery in Eastwood, an inner suburb of Adelaide. At that time I’d been employed as a painter/decorator and restorer for a Melbourne based developer and between work commitments I was able to gather sufficient material for an art exhibition at her “Consortium Galleries”. I entitled the display “Apathalia”, as a protest against the wanton devastation and destruction I saw and read daily about that was being dealt upon Australia’s flora and fauna for mainly financial gain. In the main the paintings consisted of two panels a before and after (diptychs) though there was occasion for three panel paintings (triptychs), as well; e.g. a stand of gum trees, their destruction, a stand of pine trees. This particular painting somewhat annoyed my developer/employer, he was also a director in the family-run business of Australian Softwoods, but we remained friends.

Besides subjects such as scrubland becoming suburbia, live fish into dead fish etc; I also challenged the then fairly common practice of hanging foxes’ tails on automobile aerials. The exhibition was successful, attendances were good and most of the works were purchased. But, as the critic David Dolan said, “Unfortunately, the people whose attitudes are under attack are not likely to see Richardson’s paintings at least not in large enough numbers”. Sadly, I have no photographic record of any of these pictures. At this time I worked as a self-employed painter/decorator. Artistic endeavours amounted to designing handbills for concerts for the “Adelaide Chorus, of which I was a member and a fairly regular similar activity for the “Corinthian Singers”.

Through an art school colleague’s mother’s connections as an interior designer I was introduced to an Adelaide entrepreneur and developer, Dean Rimmington, and by way of this, commissioned to paint a large abstract canvas for his newly refurbished home. Our shared enjoyment of classical music (the painting was inspired by Williams Walton’s first symphony) lead to a further commission; a nautical painting for his study.

It was in the mid-late eighties that I was to gain a contract to perform in several productions with the State Opera of South Australia.

In 1988 I designed programme covers for the A.B.C. Bicentennial Seniors Symphony Orchestra and with fellow chorister and long-time artist friend; Colin Dudley painted sets for “Barossa” a Bicentennial Authority Commission opera composed by another old friend and colleague, Ralph Middenway. The painting of the sets was carried out in an old leaky and disused warehouse over several weeks in cold and wet conditions. Certainly not conducive to healthy and cheerful creativity.

When compelled to paint a picture through artistic necessity or believing the time auspicious, I’ve attempted to gain some note by submitting entries for the Archibald, Melrose, Blake and Doug Moran national art prizes.

By 1994, Pamela was owed several weeks paid long service leave which was spent with us holidaying in the United Kingdom and Europe visiting places of interest, some old some new and at galleries and museums in England, France, Germany and Greece.

A return to England in 1998 was initiated through Pamela’s desire to spend ten months working as a relief Special Education teacher at schools in the Midlands. My time was spent experimenting with a Pointillist approach to painting on cardboard. Several landscapes were completed which were displayed in the ‘Artifex Galleries, a modern experimental art complex in nearby Sutton Coldfield. Weekends were spent touring the surrounding district (an area packed with several old castles, battlefield sights, ancient churches and peaceful countryside) mainly with new friends we’d made or on our own. During the long summer holiday we drove, in an old car we’d bought, through Belgium and Germany to stay with friends in Bavaria before continuing through the Alps to Italy to spend time with Pamela’s cousin in Florence and then onto Sutri (outside Rome) to stay at our daughters’ in-laws.

A weekend spent in London and a visit to the ‘New Tate’ gallery rekindled a passion for the work of Mark Rothko when we chanced upon a room devoted to a collection of his work. Returning to Australia via New York we spent a few days visiting the Metropolitan Opera House, The Metropolitan Museum and Art Gallery and the Guggenheim Museum.

A further return to England in 2000 was spent sharing Christmas with a close friend we’d made in 1998. We then visited the Lake District (to spend some time in an area which was the subject of a book I’d read) before continuing on to Scotland to enjoy the snowbound Highlands.

I was present at an opening of an exhibition of Philip Pike’s paintings. The new gallery, “Scarlatties” was owned by his sister and brother in-law. I was invited to hold my own exhibition at the end 2001. The gallery, built on a hill overlooking their vineyard, has superb views of the Clare Valley-north of Adelaide and is famous for wine production, I decided to paint a further series on the subject of the biblical ‘Apocalypse’. Highly colourful and somewhat figurative in content, the exhibition also included “The Eyes of Heaven”, an unaccepted entry I’d made for the Blake Prize.

In our 1994 visit to Europe we’d spent several days on the Aegean island of Patmos, where the Apocalypse was written, and I myself had experienced a revelation while overlooking the sight where the manifestations are recorded as having taken place. I shared the exhibition with Douglas Bell, a much awarded and sought-after woodcarver. Some months later “The Eyes of Heaven” was bought by a private benefactor for the collection of the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Adelaide.

In 2003 I was again invited to share an exhibition at “Scarlatties”, (this time with two painters and two silversmiths) to be held at the end of 2004 to celebrate a new production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle”. (I successfully auditioned to perform in the 1998 production but being in England, was unable to take part.) The gallery proprietress explained that as it was expected that many overseas visitors would be attending the performances it was necessary, for promotional purposes, to present an accurate account of the number and size of the works we artists would exhibit and give a brief description of our intentions by the following day!

My love of Rothkos paintings and a desire to paint something big (like the four operas) lead me to reply that I would paint four -two metre square abstract compositions-with the addition of some non-figurative symbolism for each of them. The operas are based on an ancient Norse saga the contents of each portray:
1. The theft of magical gold and its forging into fabulous treasure (including a ring of great power) and a second theft, which attaches a curse to the bearer of the ring.
2 and 3, The consequences of the thefts
4. The ring’s eventual return to its rightful owners.

I have a good friend in Adelaide (the benefactor referred to earlier) who was able to, through her connections with the University of South Australia; glean any amount of references and publications devoted to Viking legend and culture; and several books on Wagner and the Ring Cycle operas themselves. These were, along with recordings of performances that I’d purchased, a source of enormous value both leading towards and during the painting of the final compositions.

Having made notes from the written material and from the ideas the music suggested I sketched possibilities for final compositions before painting four 30cm canvases which included those ideas that I thought best portrayed the elements of each of the operas, allowing each painting to suggest a natural progression from the other.

Then from these small compositions I repeated the process with the canvases enlarged to 80cms, if necessary deleting or adding further improvements as the case may be.

The final two metre square canvases had to be executed at a larger venue in Adelaide (our church hall) as my studio was too small to accommodate their dimensions. Fortunately, the other two painters involved with the exhibition had insufficient work to exhaust the gallery space so I was able to exhibit, along with the four major canvases, the eight preliminary works as well.

Unfortunately, the expected large numbers of visitors never eventuated, either at the opening or afterwards. However, I was able to sell the set of small preliminary paintings and one of the four 80cm square ones.

I mentioned earlier the visit to England and Scotland in 2000. During the visit Pamela and I stayed not far from Lake Bassenthwaite in Cumberland. This was the area that author Melvyn Bragg had chosen for the main events in his novel, ‘Credo’. We also visited St Bega’s Church nearby which was named after the heroine in the story. I took several photographs of this and the surrounding scenery and from these painted a series of four small canvases in 2005.

Later that year I was invited to exhibit, in a mixed exhibition of invited artists, a painting in celebration of the festival of the Feast of the Assumption. My entry was a vertical canvas of – from its dark blue base-a succession of slowly intensifying paler blues. Over which I painted, in the upper portion of the canvas, a Christmas lily.

In 2006, having returned from another Christmas visit to England, I spent all of the year renovating a small dilapidated heritage listed cottage- - the outcome being a congratulatory endorsement from the Adelaide City Council and a hopefully ever-increasing investment reward for out future.

SInce then my wife and I have relocated to Melbourne to be closer to our children. We now live in the beautiful hilly suburb of Tecoma where I spend my spare time gardening, singing, listening to music and working on commission paintings.