Over the last 12 mths I have been travelling and working along the Finke River in
the Central Desert NT and along the south coast of NSW. Both place s are veryfamiliar. The plein-air works and the things I see make indelible impressions on me but
once I get back into the studio then the conversion into more oblique painterly
imagery begins.
It is the feeling of place I am most interested in, I am not so crazy about the beauty of paint, its seductiveness. Beauty is another whole debate but generally for me it’s the enemy, a surface thing, a very shallow thing.
Sometimes it’s the most awkward, tough parts of a picture that are the most telling. Sometimes the overworked or angry bits, the half-erased, the crude accidents, they are the parts that have escaped my thinking, they are the parts I don’t know, that carry themselves away from me.

I love knitting all the possibilities together, to get near the thing, to have it suddenly take me by
surprise. Without the surprise element, that thing that’s unknown to me even after I’ve made it, I get a bit restless and dissatisfied. I think painting makes this demand of you –‘ Give me something new, something
not on this earth before. Don’t tell me what I am, tell me what I might be.’
It’s a big call but I can’t resist it.
I never quite know what will pop up as a signifier of a certain place. It might be the slightest thing that can be a touchstone within the image, a shadow of a memory, a distant subtle dislocation of form. These tiny shifts and alliances are so important to me, that and keeping it looking accidental, a product of bypass, which of course is impossible. In the end everything comes down to invention, how far you can push that image
without it falling over the edge and losing its communicative force.

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