Parkland Summer

This is a large piece from my Parkland series, showing a refining of the themes and motifs from that period. The piece represent simultaneously the landscape and the inhabitants of urban life.
The image can be read top down, like a birds eye view of riverside landscape and also ground view as we see the world. Urban structure, and the life within are merged into a tapestry of line and colour with stylised figures dancing in a dreamlike landscape.

Painted in 2005, it is one of the few pieces I have left from this period of my work, I have been quite attached to it and this is the first time I have offered it for sale. I regard it as one of the most successful of the period with the flow of the linework and the fresh colour selection combining very well.

Canvas has been painted stretched and then removed from the frame. Will need to be re-stretched to hang.

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Hi and welcome to my gallery.

My grandmother Claire MacIntosh, was a talented commercial illustrator and an accomplished oil painter and water colourist. It was she who first introduced me to drawing and painting as a child. I remember her teaching me about art- without me realising I was being taught. Thanks to her I always believed there was no reason I could not or should not make art, which is a great gift.

Born on the Gold Coast, I now live in Brisbane. During the 1990’s I was fascinated with illustration and the classical and surrealist painters, working mainly on drawings and oils on canvas. I gradually moved into making larger scale works including wall murals and street art using a wide variety of mediums, my subject matter mostly imaginative and surrealist themed, heavily influenced by graffiti’s relentless obsession with the moving line. An appreciation of the subtle and intricate details of local natural systems led me to complete a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science in 1999.

A couple of years painting murals for Logan City Council in the early 2000's allowed me to distill a more gestural and expressive way of painting that forms the compositional structure of most of my current work. I made a large number of paintings in my studio around that time which I called the Parkland series, because the themes were always the mix of patterns natural and urban life around me. Murals I made for LCC at this time still exist around Logan.

Currently I am painting in the studio, working on various street art and mural projects, and creating with digital media. Influenced by graphic design, graffiti, comic art, and classical art and science, I work from photographs I take, as well as from the imagination.

I seek to examine and understand how we shape the world we inhabit, and how we as humans are shaped by it. One of the most profound challenges of our time is our relationship with the planet we live on, where we evolved into sentience, which we now damage and exploit as if we are separate from it. Art is one way I feel we can reconnect with ourselves and celebrate the moment and space we are in.

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