It Was Me All Along

The only thing ever holding us back is the story we keep in our own hands. Let it go, and the whole country lights up.

A girl stands at the edge of a luminous country, a thin white rope in her hand. Follow the rope and you find no one on the other end. It winds through the entire painting, past the cockatoos gathered in the golden trees, along the river of blue sky, up the green hill to the little red-roofed house, and back to her. The moment she sees this, the whole country lights up.

It Was Me All Along is part of The Middle Country, the centre of my art, an ongoing series about the quiet truth that we were never separate from the world we move through.

Acrylic on MDF board, 40 x 50 cm, signed on the front. Ready to hang.

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I grew up in a house that smelled of oil paint, watching my father work without ever being taught. Thirty years on, my paintings stand on loose, accidental grounds, half accident, half intention, made somewhere in the middle where the paint and I meet. That middle is where the series takes its name: The Middle Country. My cockatoos and figures are all one thing, my family, painted over and over in a glowing landscape, with the conviction that real happiness comes from within. Painting full time since 1998, Brisbane, Australia.