Balga Feeding Rainbows

Balga Feeding Rainbows is a series of paintings celebrating the beauty of our unique flora and fauna. The Balga plant is a favourite of mine. I admire the fountain shape of its leaves and the benefits the plant brings to the natural environment. The Indigenous people discovered many riches that included food and medicine.

They are some interesting web pages explaining the many uses for the Balga. I liked one page that told of Indigenous people using the leaf blade as a knife for cutting through meat. And I can agree, as I have had a few knife cuts from trimming the leaves.

I have a backyard full of these plants that produce a large spiked flower around January. This annual flowering attracts another favourite of mine - the cheeky Rainbow Lorikeet.

The colour palette offered by the birds’ plumage is a delight to the eyes. It seems mother nature threw out the idea of camouflage when it came to the dress code of this species. It wasn’t until I started to paint the background for this series that I started to appreciate how well the bird blends into the vivid colours of our Australian sky and native plants.

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I have taken the long road to discover that painting and photography can sit side by side, for me painting is my first meaningful creative outlet. I use my photography to inspire my artwork and I hope my love of composition, subject and light come through in my artwork.

I was born in Papua New Guinea and lived on a remote rubber plantation before moving to Sydney in 1971 at the age of 7. I was finding it hard adjusting to the city and my mother encouraged me to take up oil painting.

Having won an art competition when I was 10, the judges recommended that I study at the local TAFE on a Saturday morning. I completed one term but felt out of place with students who were all over 16 years old, so I did not continue. (I was also a TV junkie, we had no TV in Papua, and staying at TAFE meant missing out on Hey Hey It’s Saturday.)

It took me 40 years to rediscover painting.

The one constant in my work is to find a new project and during my break from painting I have been a project manager in Information Technology. This kept me in a world with projects, and here too I learnt that even the smallest piece of data contributes its meaning towards each information system. The other constant motivating me in life is to finish a project so I can start a new one.

My creative drive comes from knowing that each brush stroke I make contributes its meaning towards the completed work. What inspires me about art is how the smallest brush strokes, when added together, can radiate a meaning for the person who gazes at the painting far beyond the meaning of each brush stroke.

I aim to do my best in each project and try to avoid, at all cost, the haunting feeling I get when I leave a project unresolved. Even to this day I still think of my unfinished painting of a sailing boat peeping out behind photographic developing chemicals back in 1979. I was 15 then and my easel had been replaced by a camera and darkroom. A part of me still needed to finish the oil painting, but photography filled the void, so the unfinished artwork was thrown away in a frenzied darkroom clean out before my HSC exams.