The Continuum Works
Unlike most landscape artists, who find a scene they like and then set about capturing it on canvas, these paintings start as a rough sketch on paper drawn from my imagination. In the process of creating the work on canvas I use photos as a reference to create the natural reality that you see here. By working this way I am able to compose my scenes to highlight what I want the viewer to focus on. I want to encourage people to think about what they are seeing – the fact that the work looks like a photograph but is created on the canvas from my imagination.
In reality the scenes may not exist but evoke a feeling and a sense of place. They are redolent with spirituality, and the close perspective of the foreground draws the viewer into the work - at once intimate, part of the scene, but also an observer. I want to convey the feeling of the viewer being on the threshold of discovery, coming across a scene glimpsed for the first time. I also want the viewer to think about their relationship with the environment – past and present, natural and man-made, and how we have shaped that environment for our own purposes.
In the Continuum series I have tried to convey the continual cycle of life, decay, and rebirth that is pivotal to our (& earth's) survival. The paintings are often set in native bush, which epitomises this cycle or continuum: that our future is built on the bones of the past, represented by the leaf litter & the primordial rocks; the present is the living green trees; the future the landscape viewed in the distance - a distance that can also be seen as the pre-European past. This journey through time leads to the premise that our destiny is gradually moving further from our colonisation and settlement of the land to our eventual exit from it. But there is an optimism and hope in these works, it will be a rebirth of paradise, after man has gone, and our past becomes our future. Nature takes over again, and it returns to how it was. It is my optimistic hope that this is how we will leave the earth, not a devastated blackened Armageddon, but that man's presence will just disappear, leaving the earth - eventually - as we found it.
