Artist Background:

I have always liked to create things using my mind and my hands.  In the early 1980’s I was encouraged to join an oil painting class in Canberra.  I greatly enjoyed it and actually sold several paintings in that first year.  On moving to Melbourne other priorities absorbed my time, but in 1991 I joined a private oil painting class.  For several years I have painted by myself.

Like most novices I started with realist paintings, then moved to semi-abstract images and now endeavour to create abstract works.  If I use an object or a scene as the basis for a painting, I try to extract from it the essence of what attracted my attention in the first place.  This may be pleasing shapes, lines, colours or a combination of all three.  I usually don’t stay with the original colours and try to create more interest by eliminating unnecessary detail, and by distortion and cubist techniques such as lines or planes penetrating solids.  For totally abstract works I use a variety of starting points, generally with some sort of line structure or “backbone” which can then be elaborated.

In my early years of painting I had a fairly rigid style with too much precision.  This reflected a lifetime of working with numbers and computers.  I have been trying hard to free this up and have gone some way towards this goal.  During this search I have experimented with a great variety of styles.  I will continue to experiment, as I don’t want to get bored with producing the same sort of art and I don’t want to bore the viewer either.