My art school days were exciting right from the start. I met many amazing people, both students and lecturers. I created deep friendships and as fate would have it, I ended up in a five-year tumultuous relationship with the very same young woman that I met in the cafe the year before. Her name was Barbara and she was beautiful. Just what a young man fresh out of the confines of a four-year stint at an all boys boarding school needed.
It was also a time of much experimentation both artistically and personally for myself and for many of my contemporaries.
In some ways I probably missed the full benefits of studying at this institution because of my desire to experiment in my personal life, but I was young and I think it was important to me to get all of that out of my system at an early age. So even though I saw other students developing ambition to go on to do postgraduate and masters degrees, that just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t until after I had returned from Europe following my art school days that I wanted to develop my career options by doing a teacher training.
Exposure to international art in London and Europe, in the early eighties, encouraged me to pursue my career as an artist. One defining moment was experienced at the Tate Gallery in London, 1981. In a gallery space devoted to Mark Rothko, the American abstract expressionist, I experienced the depth of and commitment in his work. The exhibition moved me to tears, and provided a level of inspiration that I had not experienced until that point. Another Rothko piece (from a different period), seen several years later while visiting the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, filled me with the same feeling of understanding.
Looking back, with the benefit of experience, I can say that it was the sincerity and purity from within his paintings that moved me. Upon returning to Australia, after spending some time going back and forth and sometimes residing in the United States, I took up a position as artist in residence at Editions Gallery, Western Australia.
Living and working with other artists is an education in itself. Fellow painter Keith Looby, prompted me to explore more painterly qualities in my work, while John Beard would help deepen my exploration into abstraction. The vitality and intensity with which both of these artists approached their work left quite an impact on me, subsequently affecting the way I approached my own art practice.
Significant support in the form of both patronage and exhibition opportunities by Alan Delaney, from Delaney Galleries in Perth, also assisted greatly to my uncompromising dedication to my art. Pat Corrigan in later years was another figure to emulate this support.
Some of the great masters, of course, provided me with great inspiration. 17th century Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez, for his monumental figurative paintings which reveal, upon closer inspection, the most amazing abstract painterly qualities, has to this day had a great impact on my work. The later post-impressionist movement was highly inspirational, particularly artists like Van Gogh, whose work was explosive and brilliant. A more complete list should also include American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock and later Roy Lichtenstein and more recently Jeff Koons, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I resonate particularly these days with Pat Stiers work, Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois. I was influenced as well by the Australian artists Tony Tuckson, Brett Whiteley and Ian Fairweather, primarily due to the energy that their work conveys.
