Still Holding On

Still Holding On

Some lines are never dropped, no matter how far the country runs. This one is held at both ends.

A thin white line runs the whole length of this painting, from a figure standing at the top of the red cliff to a girl sitting quietly at the bottom, the coil resting in her lap. The line stays slack the entire way. No one is pulling, and no one lets go. In the middle of the country, a mother and child hold hands outside a little red-roofed house while cockatoos gather in the golden trees.

Still Holding On 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, or from each other.

Acrylic on MDF board, 50 x 40 cm, signed on the front. Sold unframed, ready to hang as is.

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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.