This blog was originally supposed to be just about painting; I wanted to write about the everyday processes of the craft (a bit like trying to make a blow by blow description of washing up interesting) but I suppose some digressions are inevitable. Whenever I start thinking about a particular image it seems to be entangled with whatever was going on in my life at that time: memories, events, stories that people told me, what I was reading, inspired by, listening to, even eating. (Trivia: a strikingly beautiful Armenion Cypriot friend used to eat red food when she wanted her period to arrive early. Did it work? No idea, but I liked the idea. Another mate, a recovering anorexic, used to encourage herself to eat by having colour themed dinners: green or red tasted ok but white was a killer.)

The painting The Waterhole is a case in point; it deals with the here and now, but also layers of memory, both mine and other peoples. When I was a teenager one of my friends fell passionately in love with a red-haired girl; when her family moved away from Tasmania he was devastated and spent years in a kind of psychic spin. She had a high forehead, copper hair and very pale skin (a little like Botticelli’s Venus, in real life apparently another tragic, unattainable love interest). She is one of the models for the painting’s female figure.

In the 70s one of Mum’s friends worked as a dealer in Indian miniature paintings and antiques. I loved these tiny paintings and without knowing anything about the pantheon of Indian Gods absorbed from them ideas about the anti-naturalistic use of colour, non linear perspective and richly decorated surfaces. I like the directness of non Western art: how do you arrange your composition to show that a figure is particularly important? Bugger perspective and careful strategies to lead the eye around the picture; just make him or her three times the size of everyone else. The canopy of trees in my painting is an attempt to directly reference the colour and intricate patterning of these miniature images.

Lyrebirds: something I normally have no interest in, except for feeling slightly bitter that I’ve spent hours sitting on my ass on damp ground in rainforests waiting to see one, with no result. Then TM told me about some research he was doing, tracing lyrebirds through music and art history, and mentioned an early Australian music score that referenced their song, a kind of antipodean Leda and the Swan. He’d been invited up to the University of Newcastle Minding Animals conference to deliver a paper and stubbornly arrived wearing his favourite leather jacker; a near lynching by vegans was inevitable. Anyway, the elusive lyrebird resurfaced in my mind as something beautiful, otherworldly, unknowable, exquisite, mythical and delicate. The costume of my male figure is intended to represent a lyrebird’s plumage and if you look hard there’s a couple of lyrebirds courting on the dark green grass between the couple’s heads.

This is a painting all about lost love, the boy looking in the waterhole is a direct quote of the literary tradition of people having some kind of epiphany after catching sight of themselves in a mirror.