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Artist Statement |
I was born in Manly NSW in 1937. My early life was fairly nomadic as my father was a Shakespearian actor and the family was constantly on the move. This meant that schooling was intermittent and infrequent. My education however, was carried on within the family by my father who was deeply immersed the European tradition and imbued me with a love of literature and philosophy from an early age. At 14 I began work to support my family as my father’s career was virtually over I first worked on a dairy farm at Mulgoa but later came to Sydney and began work in a publishing house and at 16 attended art classes at the East Sydney Technical College, (now called the National Art School)
I had been painting for some time but this was always interrupted by the needs of my family. From the age of 17 I worked as a commercial artist and in my early 20′s was an Advertising Production Manager and an Art Director, I also freelanced but gave all this away in 1964 when my father died. During the time I was working as a commercial artist (the equivalent of today’s graphic designer), I was very much influenced by the work of Ben Shan and Saul Bass.
After this I went into analysis and trained as a therapist and in 1967 began to train as an Art Teacher. During this time I painted very little. I subsequently taught Art for 12 years and also worked as a psychotherapist. . In 1972 I stopped teaching and painted for 2 years, after which I had an exhibition that was reasonably successful. My work as a therapist became more important and I was involved in establishing art-therapy as a treatment modality in a major psychiatric hospital. The demands of work gradually increased, reaching a crisis point in 1982 when I was forced to change my lifestyle to avoid serious consequences to my health, Over a period of 5 years I spent most of my time sailing and painting on the waters of the Hawkesbury River, Broken Bay area and in 1988 had an exhibition of paintings that were the result of this period of time.
These paintings were about connections between land and water, fantasy and external reality. – More recently my work has been about childhood experience and figures in a landscape but these figures do not seem to be embedded in the landscape rather, they are imposed on it, suggesting the experience of the Irish immigrant as well as my own experience of not being in one place long enough to feel that I belonged. In coming from an Irish family I have always had strong connections with the European visual tradition. My feeling is that my strongest influences have been Soutine, Schiele, Kokoschka, The Tuscan Painter Tosi and the Irish painter Jack Yeats. Essentially, as a painter, I see myself as inspired by the humanistic aspects of the expressionist movement and the profound significance of the object.
A number of my works are in private collections and I believe that one painting that I did when I was eighteen was in a private collection for 40 years and is now in the New England Regional Gallery |
