When You're Not Here

There are people we love so much that we worry for them across time we will never see. This painting is a promise that the world will hold them, that there will always be a warm day, a full tree, and someone close by.
This is one of my Middle Country paintings, the cockatoo and outback series at the centre of my art. It starts from a poured ground, half accident and half intention, colour left to find its own shape before I meet it and start to work. From that, the scene grew into a village on a hillside, houses along the ridge, trees full of cockatoos, figures moving through the warmth of it all, nobody alone.
I keep returning to the idea that we live always somewhere in the middle, never fully arrived, never fully gone. This one sits inside that space, a warm hillside full of life, with room for everyone I love.
Painted in acrylic on MDF board. Ready to hang, with a certificate of authenticity included.

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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.