Last week I spent every day and night painting.
I had started 6 paintings nearly one year ago and they all came to a stand still and dropped off the radar while I made the difficult decision to move out of the family home. After finishing the paintings for the Hamilton Connections show, I went back to those 6 paintings, They were images derived from sections of previous paintings I have done. Using the computer images of the paintings in the Microsoft Paint program, I cropped them to come up with an abstract design that I liked.   

I finished those initial six and felt very happy with them. They seemed to me to be my first truly mature works. I took them to show Dr Elizabeth Arthur because I was anxious to get a knowledgable reaction. She was very encouraging and positive about them. So much so, that I went home and took the other 12 canvases of the same size ( 40cm x 61cm) and drew up a set of images created in the same way as the first 6. 

Elizabeth had told me about the Stadel Museum exhibition currently on at the National Gallery of Victoria. I told myself that if I could complete theses 12 paintings by Thursday night, I would go to the NGV show on the Friday. Each night from Sunday to Thursday I stayed up late into the night painting. The first two nights I was up until at least 3 am. On  Tuesday and WednesdayI stayed up until after 5 am.  I was on a roll, and would get up at around 10 am to see what I had done the night before. It was eye opening to see with fresh eyes each morning, because I was so constantly working between the canvases simultaneously that I didn't really stop and stand back to take in what I had done.

I finished at about 1am on Friday morning and went to bed before getting up at 6am to catch the bus to Melbourne. The Stadel show was great and because I went late on a weekday it was not overly crowded. It was worth the entry fee ($23) just to seethe two small Paul Klee paintings on display.There were pleanty of other good paintings to see as well.

On Saturday, I packed up all 18 canvases and took them to Elizabeth's gallery to show her. Her reation was wonderful and she seemed genuinely excited by the prospect of hanging them in her gallery. They are abstract images at first view but have been derived from paintings I have made primarily of heads and figures. They are landscapes and figurative paintings simultaneously. They are structured with a collage mindset and intuitive colour use. Of all the paintings I have done over the years I am most comfortable putting my name to these 18 Crop paintings. For me, they have been the most important series I have created in terms of my artistic development. Images to be posted soon.

                                                What am I? Where have I come from? Whare am I going? 2010

I worked for two weeks exclusively on this painting. Finished and delivered it to the Gallery on Thursday.  I started it some time ago and took a break from it for several weeks while I finished off some other paintings that had been at a point of no progress for a long time.
What am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? is a painting that has been in my head for about three years. 

Both theme and title are taken from Gauguins large painting - Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?  The other main visual influence on the painting is the Mayan mural at Bonampak Mexico (2). This mural has faded badly over the centuries but mainly due to damage caused by human intervention since it was discovered in 1946. There has been a virtual restoration done recently that supposedly gives an accurate indication of the original colours used.  It was upon these colours that I based the colour scheme of my painting.

Whereas Gauguin's work is a collective consciousness take on the question of human existence and religion. My painting is intended to be more from the perspective of an individual's struggle with existential thoughts. I wanted the subject in my painting to be alone while acknowledging his/her relationship to humanity through the ages. So, although he/she is isolated in an imagined landscape, the majority of the pictorial space is taken up bu the vessels,  masks and relics of human existence from the past.  

1 Where do we come from? What are we? Where are  we going?  Paul Gauguin 1897-1898.

2 Mayan Mural Bonampak Mexico

Random Note Book Pages showing preliminary ideas

Early draughts