I have always been drawn to trying to depict landscape, accompanied by a fascination with the Ordnance Survey maps of Britain and the mysteries they contain. My mother, Julia, was a prodigious exhibiting watercolourist particularly of the Thames Valley and West Somerset. At school I was fortunate to be in an enterprising art department open to radical changes that were happening in the art world. The teachers encouraged experiment, particularly Gordon Baldwin, whose ceramic work is held by the NGV.
I trained and worked as an architect until a trip through South America led to an exhibition of Chilean landscapes in Santiago. On return to the UK, I enlisted at the City and Guilds of London Art School, under the aegis of Roger de Grey, then President of the Royal Academy. Shortly after completing a Diploma in Fine Art, I joined the First Fleet Re-enactment in 1987 and crossed the Indian Ocean on the ‘Soren Larsen’. A square-rigged vessel and crew, and the sea, provides an infinity of subject matter.
Successfully exhibiting paintings of the voyage in Sydney and at Melbourne Maritime Museum in the Bicentennial Year I fortunately met Susan and settled here, first at Deans Marsh and then on farmland near a lake west of Ballarat with our two sons, the elder of which has framed these paintings. The flattish land with views to the declining end of the Great Diving Range is an ideal landscape subject, a stage for the theatre of the harvest, and the spectacular light shows nature provides.
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