Seascapes and Landscapes
More recently I have been exploring Australia’s wonderful coastline and landscapes. Using rich colour and thick texture in oil paint I strive to present the diversity and richness in our country.
There is a beauty in feeling the sea salt, sea spray and wind on your face. Hearing the sea on a day when there is stillness in the air but the sound of the sea travels to you. Running into the water, laughing and daring others to join you, to feel the cold and freshness with the first splash. A nod, a smile when you walk past someone else on the beach brings a feeling of a shared moment. Or maybe it’s a day when the sea is turbulent, turning on itself, when the sky and sea are grey but you still enjoy the windy walk on the beach or observing it from a window.
Our land, our colours are rich and earthy. Just a few days in the Flinders Ranges can be refreshing and calming while exploring the country and history. Visiting when the land is green and fertile with an abundance of wild life, or dry and dusty with bones on the ground and crying out for water, you realize that there is both a fragility and richness to our land.
Portraits
I also have a passionate interest in painting large bold people focussed works using various styles to explore feelings, intensity and form. I work with a number of different mediums including, charcoal, bitumen, gold leaf and oils.
As well as being an artist I also work as a Registered Nurse and one of my directions for painting is to capture the nurses that I work with. Such is the admiration I feel for my colleagues in the health industry that capturing them on canvas is a dedication to them. My colleagues continually strive to improve the best health care they can deliver, often in stressful situations.
We have a uniform that is essential to professionalism and practicality. As an artist, on this occasion I would like to take my colleagues out of their uniform and portray each of them as the diverse group of human beings of all ages and cultural backgrounds, adding to the richness of their stories. I have captured their images to explore the uniqueness of each subject and painted them as beautiful people of depth I know them to be.
I also paint on maps, plans or something personal to the sitter letting the images show through the painting so that the person is part of and entwined with the background with the subtle concepts that tell their story. Maps and plans represent movement and changes that occur during our lifetime. I am interested in the reality, truth and poignancy of a single moment or a certain intensity provided by the subject. I hope that the viewer doesn’t get caught up with trying to work out who the subject is but rather to enjoy and explore the beauty, intenseness or joy of life that evokes thought and feelings.