Nothing To Hold

The door was never locked, only closed, and the moment she stopped gripping the whole sky came in.

A woman sits at the edge of a high cliff, an open birdcage beside her and one small bird lingering at her feet. Below and around her the whole board erupts into flight, sulphur crested cockatoos and swallows pouring out across a fall of orange, deep blue and green, the surface alive with flecks of red and yellow. She is not watching them go so much as letting them, her stillness the quiet centre of all that movement. An original acrylic painting on board, 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.