About
Having spent my life involved in agriculture, the colours and shapes
of the Australian land and environment have influenced my struggle
with capturing the energy of landscapes and manmade shapes.
My father’s family emigrated from Scandinavia, all hard working
business people who cleared the land in the Goulburn area 60 years
ago to allow for farming of sheep. My mother was born in Victoria,
her father an art teacher, who had returned from the horrors
of WW1 to retreat to the solitude of the Grampian mountains where he
mastered water colours, patiently teaching his students at college
and also his children, who became artists themselves.
My mother moved to NSW after marrying my father, she missing her family, turned her days spending countless hours trying to teach an impatient and ungrateful boy what she had been taught, her love for oil painting seemingly wasted on her only son whose main passion was working in far away paddocks or riding horses or motorbikes, even the art masters at school in Parramatta eventually advising that a career in art was unlikely.
And now many years later, I was inexplicably drawn to painting again, finding that expression of colours and abstract shapes lent a certain peace to cope with the setbacks that life so often delivers Maybe my mother’s efforts were not all wasted.