This series evolved from a combination of imagination, memory, and regional travels throughout NSW. With flowing integrated bands of paint and spontaneous automatic markings that describe no specific place or moment in time but just a memory of an area and a passing through landscape.Â
The main inspiration for the ‘LOST HORIZONS SERIES’ are the large open spaces of the Australian landscape areas particularly the Snowy Mountains, Cooma & Monaro Plains and the Salt Lakes of outback Australia. They represent a heady mix of direct experience, memory and mood.Â
Characterised by many layers of oil paint, the process involves multiple glazes and thick impasto, blended in an intuitive and expressive style. It is scratched and etched, marked and rubbed, built up and scraped down, until the painted areas give way to a detailed yet almost weathered effect. The feeling of open plains eroded over time, natural processes of weathering, dissolution, and abrasion wearing away the earth’s surface is communicated. Read More..
LOST HORIZONS works are fundamentally about the inner relationship between ourselves and the environment and the Earth we inhabit. In this world of constant flux and change, I see my role as an artist as one of exploring the intimate aspects of our relationship with the land we regularly pass through. The Monaro landscape is arresting and quite stark, it is delicate and hardy, with soft grasses juxtaposed against rugged rocks and dead trees. The dramatic skies shimmer with light piercing through cloud on the horizon.
I aim to produce eye-catching and unusual abstract landscapes, with newly mixed colour using iridian pigment which refracts light, and lots of texture and automatic markings. I use layers of paint that merge instinctively, and scratch and paint symbolic elements such as rivers, trees, rocks and stormy skies. In this series the land and horizon, or sea and horizon, often merge as one. My recurring themes are connection and belonging to land; the fragility of the land; ebb and flow; time and impermanence; the light within and reflections of light on sea and in the landscape.
This is what I love to create and what I would like the viewer to feel – that feeling of expansiveness, timelessness, impermanence and connection while being out in the middle of nowhere or by the edge of the ocean.