2012 Deep In The Heart

‘You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming’ – Pablo Neruda.

Growing up on a farm in Galston, an hour out of Sydney, I’ve always felt most at peace working from studios set up in rural areas. For the past eight months, my residency at the Fraser Street Studios, Sydney has landed me in Woolloomooloo, only a few kilometres from the CBD. This change in studio environment and location has allowed me to explore nature within my city. Frequent trips to the Museum of Natural History, the Royal Botanic Gardens and Centennial Parklands have offered a constant stream of inspiration.

In this body of paintings entitled ‘Deep In The Heart’, I continue my exploration of the beautiful and sometimes strange organic forms found within nature. Working wet into wet paint, I push and pull it around the surface in the search for an inner truth. This method of scrapping and reapplying paint over days, sometimes months, reflects the passing of time, the subtle nuances that are left through rigorous hours of painting creating an underlying history that goes deeper than the subject, into a world of imagined forms, textures and colours.

These works have been heavily influenced by the natural world, memory, music and literature, including Pablo Neruda’s love poems and song lyrics from artists including Bono from U2 and Johnny Cash.