GLOBAL COLLECTORS ART PRIZE | MASTERS DEFINING THE FUTURE OF ART

Biography

Sorry, Dad - I Became an Artist

“No son of mine is going to be a struggling artist.” Those were my father’s words when, in 1974, I told him I wanted to study art. Painting and drawing had been a source of delight since childhood, but my working life initially took a different direction. I completed a Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in Industrial Relations and Economics, and went on to spend 35 years in advertising, marketing, tourism, and hotels. Art remained a passion, even as the demands and opportunities of business occupied much of my life.

My career gave me other ways to express my creativity. As a creative marketer, I formed and ran businesses, first in adventure travel and later in the international luxury hotel sector. These ventures took me across Australia and around the world. Whenever possible, I sought out remote and extraordinary natural settings: places that drew me away from the pace of business and back towards the pleasures of looking. Those encounters with landscape became a lasting source of inspiration, providing a rich store of memories and impressions to which I continue to return to in my art.

In 2012, after selling my business and spending a few years consulting, I decided it was time to give my boyhood passion the attention it deserved. I applied to Australia’s National Art School and was accepted. Returning to study marked a new chapter: the opportunity to move painting from the margins of a busy life to its centre. I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in Sydney in 2015 and have since devoted myself to developing my practice, with landscape at its heart.

One of my major works, Southerly Bondi, occupied me for nearly a year. It was followed by a very different and deeply enjoyable period of sketching and painting on location in the Western MacDonald Ranges in Central Australia. Working directly in the landscape brought the experience of travel and the practice of painting together. The sketches and paintings I made there became the foundation for a series of studio landscapes, allowing me to revisit those places through a more sustained engagement with the work. The series was showcased in my solo exhibition in Sydney in September 2018.

After that successful exhibition, my wife, Ruth, and I travelled overseas for 18 months. Throughout our journey, I sketched, drew, and painted, gathering reference material that continues to offer possibilities for future work. Making art as we travelled gave those experiences a second life: not simply as memories of places visited, but as subjects to return to, reconsider, and develop in the studio.

After returning to Sydney in 2020, we spent time living in Byron Bay before settling back in Sydney. In 2022, I held my third solo exhibition, Journeys, bringing together plein-air and studio works in oil and charcoal inspired by our time away.

In recent years, both landscapes and portraits have featured in my work. I am now returning with renewed concentration to the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney - a landscape I love and one that continues to invite further exploration through painting.

Alongside my art, I still do some travel writing and devote energy to social causes. I also completed a four-year project with my friend Kiyoshi Matsomoto: a book entitled Japan Unmasked, exploring the history, culture, and society of a country that fascinates me. These interests sit alongside a life shaped by travel, curiosity, and creative work, but painting remains my principal focus.

Born in 1956 and brought up in Sydney, I married my beautiful Swiss partner, Ruth, in 1983. Together, we have raised two wonderfully creative daughters, Helena and Olivia, now in their late thirties. Family, travel, and art have each been enduring threads in my life, accompanying me through a long business career and into this chapter as a practising artist.

The love of painting and drawing that began in childhood has never left me. What was once a boyhood ambition is now at the centre of my daily life. After years spent pursuing other opportunities, I devote as much time as possible to my art, drawing on the places I have known and the experiences I have gathered, while remaining open to what the next journey - or the next painting - may bring.

Artist Statement

In Search of the Sublime

I have a lifelong passion for Australian bush and wilderness environments; this subject is implanted in me, and I have a need to record and share these uplifting experiences.

I seek to capture poetic Nature, aiming to encapsulate a sense of place through my memory of the felt emotions of being there and my resultant unconscious intuitions. Influenced by eighteenth-century philosophy on aesthetics and beauty, I seek to capture the sublime in nature, inviting viewers to step outside themselves and appreciate the sheer beauty of the landscape.

I paint my own interpretation of the strangeness of our natural environment. I follow in the aesthetic traditions of Western representation, exploring paint, colour, geometric composition, and perspective on the shoulders of Romanticists such as Eugene von Guérard, Expressionists such as Paul Gauguin, Australian modernists such as Fred Williams and Albert Namatjira, and Post-Modernists such as William Robinson, to name but a few.

My passion for detail is inherent in much of my work, where the whole is made up of so many wonderful parts. My lyricism of line and often intensely saturated colour are intended to accentuate the weirdness and beauty of my surrounding environs.

I paint and draw on canvas, board, or paper using any combination of oils and acrylic paint, pastels, inks, and charcoals. En plein-air sketches and digital images inform my studio-based work. My work is planned from the outset, however, with enough room to evolve in form and colour as I progress.

My aim is to create a body of work that inspires joyous aesthetic contemplation.

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