After painting Road Kill from a Native Animal’s perspective, two people (KS and EB) suggested that I read Chloe Hooper’s book ‘A Child’s book of True Crime’ which is set in Tasmania and which KS described as having  ‘Australian native animals investigating a grisly crime in Blinky-Bill style narrative. Very disconcerting and grotesquely funny.’  I’m half way through it at the moment and it’s wonderful, though rather disturbing.

A Tasmanian Childhood, the latest painting, was a strange image: it took months to execute and each time I went out to the studio to work on it it seemed like the painting became less finished rather than more.  The visual references include that famous Amercian Gothic painting that everyone seems to know and the spatial sense and pallette of painters like Giotto and Botticelli (particularly his Birth of Venus).

In the end I only finished it because it was due to be delivered to Watt Space gallery for a group exhibition on a Monday, so I had to stop painting by Thursday of the previous week or the paint would have still been wet. There was supposed to be few lizards, a flicker of life, running around on the path near the children’s feet but I just couldn’t get them right so they were rubbed out. When I look at the painting, my eye goes straight to the place the missing lizards should be.

A Tasmanian Childhood has one what animators used to call a VCR joke, before the technology changed: they were visual gags that people would only notice if they paused the video. The tombstone on the left hand side has the name Leonard Cohen engraved on it in very small writing: not that I bear LC any ill will, I think he’s great, I was just glorying in the gothic nature of it all.

The next major painting I’m doing is called The Secret and has two children under a tree, at night, thousands of stars, looking at a small striped box on the ground between them.