Without a vision no artist can create. It is an essential element to the process, just as a canvas, paintbrush and paint are to a painter. Every artist will develop their own vision over time and it will change and refine its parameters depending on their own unique experiences.
I know for myself back then at art school I discovered freedom. I had just come from an all-boys boarding school in Melbourne, and it was time for me to shake free, and that’s exactly what I did. During my art school years I spent a lot of my time experimenting and probably not being as conscientious with personal and aesthetic decisions as I like to be these days.
I think on hindsight, I probably wanted to be somebody famous and outrageous, with as little effort required as possible.
I remember having visions and aspirations of arriving somewhere close to the caliber of the Australian artist Brett Whiteley. In the late seventies he was winning all of the art awards at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Brett won the trifecta: The Archibald, the Wynne and the Sulman Prizes in nineteen seventy-eight, in the midst of my art training. I guess he was somebody that I was looking at emulating in some way or other, however he also had a serious drug habit with heroin, which was a choice I had absolutely no intention of following. I did like the way he approached art. I felt in his career he was incredibly courageous and had an amazing natural talent, which he developed, and somewhere I got a taste of wanting to achieve something along those lines minus the tendency for addictive substances… I feel much more in the service of people now.
I am enjoying my role as a mediator between nature and humans, expressing universal truths in my work and inspiring viewers as much as I am able. When I deliver my lectures about my environmental work in Australia and overseas in the United States and Europe, I often I begin the lecture with a blessing for humanity to experience Oneness. This is where my vision has evolved, a place where my lectures and art making inform and dovetail into each other.
