Painting Bio

I started drawing from the age of five. Imagined worlds, battlefields, robbers and getaway helicopters, monsters and sailing ships – illustrations of the stories in my head.  Drawing gave me an engrossing and self-contained place to inhabit. I think all artists try to be in that place, where night falls unnoticed, time dissolves and the outside world is subsumed by your total immersion in the act of making.

I was born in Cambridge, New Zealand, in 1964. My family lived in Australia, and then Papua New Guinea, where my father worked as a veterinarian in the Eastern Highlands town of Goroka. The richness and visual splendour of the animal, bird and insect life was extraordinary. It left a lasting impression on my visual memory and is an experience that has had an enduring potency for me as a visual artist.
We returned to New Zealand when I was 10 and I began to learn about the birthplace I was a stranger to. Schools in New Guinea operated under an Australian government education system – I could name all the states in Australia, but had no knowledge of my own country’s geography, history and culture.

My intermediate and secondary school years were spent in West Auckland. In 1983, I began a bachelor degree at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts, Christchurch. I returned to Auckland in 1986, to work and exhibit in three solo painting shows. I completed my degree at Elam School of Fine Arts in 1992, continued to exhibit, and in 2000, returned to the school to teach part-time and begin post graduate studies. I graduated with an MFA hons in 2004.

Recent exhibitions were held at Northart in Auckland and Bowen Galleries in Wellington. I teach workshops and evening classes and paint from my home in Avondale, Auckland and currently I am working on a new series of oil paintings and spray stencil images on aluminium panels.

Artist Statement

In my current painting practice, I superimpose and enmesh various visual fragments of urban pop culture. Images from television dramas, computer game scenarios, motorway signs and supermarket aisles are traced or photocopied onto transparencies and projected onto the painting surface. I also use spray stencil imagery and washes of oil paint and graphite. 

I am interested in the new and unexpected formal relationships that occur as I combine visual elements from different contexts. The relationships of colour, shape, rhythm, tone, line etc, dominate decision making more than the notion of generating specific narrative connections between things.

Rather than directing the viewer into specific narrative relationships between parts of the painting, I direct my thinking around a broader set of issues:

o  The screen-dominated visual field of digital based culture.
o  A blurring of the simulated scenarios and the real ones.
o  Ideas around the notion of non-places; the universal public places like airport departure lounges, supermarket aisles and train stations where people buy, consume, commute or wait.
o  Street art. More specifically the layering, obliteration and transformation that becomes an on-going visual dialogue on city streets.

The linear superimposed paintings of Francis Picabia, the early post-modernist painters Martin Kippenberger, David Salle and Sigmar Polke and, more recently, the works of Julie Mehretu, Mathew Ritchie and Neo Rauch have all influenced my present painting direction.