In 1989 I began to paint and studied a Master of Arts at The University of Western Sydney from 99-2001. This research resulted in an exhibition at The Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney University entitled "Fragmented Values: Compulsive Lives". This Masters research later led me to become fascinated with the mode of thinking that people employ when they are involved with *cohesive in-groups where their need for security and unanimity overrides any ideas that may challenge group consensus. The enmeshed relationships within such groups isolates them from outside sources of information and analysis.
In the exhibition “Groupthink” at Lost Bear Gallery in September, 2016 I sought to examine the nature of group behaviour across a range of sub-cultures and social environments. The paintings on canvas and paper focus on sporting, business, recreational and leisure milieus which appear mundane and benign, but reveal recent change in cultural and social values, family behaviour and human relationships.
Over 20 years my studio research evolved to embrace the concept of *totalized time and the stratification of memory in my work lends itself to the historical references I use in my paintings, creating a mixture of philosophical and ideological threads through time. [*Marcel Proust]
I have always been interested in how social values and cultural history can be transmitted by folk narrative, fables and absurd yarns and what these say about group cohesion, conformity and shared presumptions. I like to collect a range of humorous stories, anecdotes on which to base subjects for my current narrative paintings. My early career performance/installation art experience and recent amateur stage design has also helped me to develop theatrical painting interpretations of social events through fictional characters and narratives. They form contemporary fables much as the “interesting eccentrics” that populated my father’s “yarns” in my childhood. In one way I have continued the “yarn-spinning” through fictional narratives based on family research.
Through fictitious and purposely ambiguous subjects I hope to stimulate the audience’s curiosity to question what is actually occurring in my paintings. These should elicit a large variety of interpretations and judgements from the viewers. The viewers are led to analyse the motives of the characters in these faux narratives and often suspect their behaviour.
During the Groupthink series I intended these works to be publicly accessible by referring to scenarios that are familiar to people in general and don’t need a specialised knowledge of art through which to engage with the scenarios. These fictional narratives are composites of experiences, events and characters which may resonate with the audience’s memories.
My recent work has been focused on the significance of location, my family history and social history through traditional genres and techniques. It is extending the work I have done with group figurative compositions over the last 20 years into the places associated with the stories I have explored. I have always been interested in how social values and cultural history can be transmitted by folk narrative, fables and absurd yarns but now have become fascinated with how places of origin, their historical/ socio-political conditions shape individuals of a family lineage.
My painting technique has evolved from linear expressionist landscape paintings in 1990 to collaged compositions of family and social history in Alkyd mediums by 2001, it has further evolved to my more recent traditional solvent-free oil painting processes used by the great Baroque masters, C19th Romanticists and Pre-Raphaelites.