It was a strangely happy day

Artist State­ment

Dur­ing a visit to the Tate gallery in Lon­don a few years ago, I stum­bled across a room of William Turner’s paint­ings unlike any I’d seen before. Thin, mostly translu­cent, washes of yel­lows, pinks, blues and browns formed land­scapes the painter was famous for. Only these works were dif­fer­ent. They looked like under-paintings. There was hardly a wisp of detail; instead, the lumi­nous washes of colour bor­dered on abstrac­tion, pre­cur­sors to Rothko. I was trans­fixed for the short moments we had to spend in the gallery, yet those paint­ings have lin­gered, form­ing a kind of revered, hazy, mem­ory of an uplift­ing and inspir­ing art experience.

That room of paint­ings have per­co­lated in my visual mem­ory since. There’s some­thing to be said about ‘less is more’. In my case, I actu­ally was doing an under­paint­ing (the first layer of paint) when the result­ing can­vas, hang­ing on my stu­dio wall, begged to be left alone. The lim­ited colour, lack of detail and streaky brush-marks pro­duced a mys­tery. I didn’t know what I was look­ing at… but I liked it!

The painting’s titles once again come from my diary. These past months have seen many changes in my and Chris’ lives. The most sig­nif­i­cant being we’ve bought one and a half acres in the Sun­shine Coast hin­ter­land, where we have begun plant­ing fruit trees, herbs, veg­gies, and natives. The titles reflect our learn­ing expe­ri­ences as the gar­den devel­ops, inspires, teaches and grows. Jux­ta­posed with the soft, abstract, landscape-based imagery, I like the way these diary excerpts cre­ate more mys­tery, as they allude to snip­pets of my day-to-day life with the back­drop of garden-like dreamscapes.