On "The Heysen Trail"

The Australian landscape to me has always been a source of great spirituality.  To stand in it, especially the farther outback you go, I feel like I am at the centre of the universe. What I see is always profound…… I feel as though I am standing in an immense sepulchre of light but with a slight misty veil shielding me from some unfathomable final resolution.  Light to me is a symbol of the eternal. I use a lot of Titanium white in my palette as I find this adds an opaque quality which permeates the landscape and conveys the sense of another dimension.  The landforms provide peripheral sculptural forms adding to the sense of mystery. This is particularly so in the late afternoon and the early morning when everything seems veiled by a subtle mist reducing detail but allowing defining contours and selected features to be highlighted by the sun. In my personal cosmology the Australian landscape defines a sense of endlessness, the eternal and the promise of a great revelation still to come.

Studied painting at the SA School of Art, Sturt College of Advanced Education, Fine Arts at Flinders University, and has exhibited in many South Australian Galleries. He continued his career as a painter when he and his family moved to Queensland in 1986 as a visual artist for the “Genesis Project “ for the inaugural Brisbane International Arts Festival, as well as at joint exhibitions in Brisbane commercial galleries, and at Sanctuary Cove.

Since returning to SA in 1999, he has featured in several exhibitions and, with actress wife Anna, has opened “Two Pike Gallery and Studio” on Goodwood Road. He is described variously by critics as a minimalist painter or an abstract expressionist. Because his work deals more with mood and atmosphere, he prefers to think of himself as a colourist and a textual painter rather than fitting in to and prescribed style. His concerns are with distance, light and textures as experienced in the crushing isolation of much of Australia.