After I left art school, I didn't do any paintings for three years. I looked at other people painting and showing their paintings. I went and looked at shows of paintings. I looked at people looking at paintings. This exhibition is about these three years. At the National Gallery of Victoria I noticed that people enjoyed looking at paintings of scenes. If a painting depicted a scene in a world view that was real or imaginary, then people would lean towards the work, rather than step back in their appraisal. I became interested in the nature of these paintings to do this. They had a power to draw people in to see more, and often, a whole new world unfolded inside these pictures.
I decided that I would like to paint scenes that exerted a similar power, a compelling quality that people thought about and enjoyed. It also made sense for me to paint such pictures, because whether I was in an art gallery looking at pictures or not, I always had scenes inside my head.
All of these pictures, from The Crackling Universe (Cat. No. 1) to One New Start (Cat. No. 33) are the results of my resolve to depict these personal scenes and ideas clearly. This has been my primary concern. I have tried to keep the interference caused by the actual art of painting down to a minimum once the idea has emerged. Thus, technique has played only a secondary role in most of these works. As my confidence in this process of translating my ideas in an this potential that painting has to move in opposite directions at once that interests me, and in the recent work One New Start I have endeavoured to express this interest.
