You’ve told me that when growing up you admired the work of artists living nearby. Who were they and how did they inspire you?

Max Middleton and Criss Canning lived locally. Crissy would often arrive at school to collect her kids in her painting overalls, which I thought was just wonderful. She painted a portrait of a dear old lady (who had listened to us primary school kids read) after she passed away - it seemed a magical thing, a means of holding onto something that had gone. Before I went off to Monash, Max painted a portrait of my sister while I watched - a terrific lesson in how to order a palette and approach the construction of a form. They were artists seriously pursuing their craft who were both very generous and encouraging.

Your studio is sited on a large property in the Dandenongs where your family established their rare bulb enterprise. Can you tell us about it and how being so close to the bush has shaped your work?

It is a large clearing surrounded by what is now the Dandenong Ranges National Park. Dad rented it for over 50 years and Mum was able to buy most of it shortly after he died in 1996. We have no neighbours, no mains power and had a fairly idyllic childhood. The bush is wet sclerophyll with tree fern gullies and bush dominated by Stringybark, Mountain Grey and Manna Gum, it is rich in bird and animal life - lyrebirds, platypus and echidnas. It is a kind of enchanted paradise.

Dad taught us to look attentionally, to notice birds building nests, ants signalling rain, to distinguish the best form and colour of a tulip in a row of seedlings. He would throw open the kitchen window and have us gulp in the heady smell of the bush after summer rain and marvel at how dormant bulbs cut in half have a flower bud already formed. That kind of deeply curious, sensual attachment to the land and natural world has shaped my work. I was a dreamy kid and would often take myself off bird watching, or to just sit and watch the creek and birds bathing for long stretches - that tendency hasn’t changed, solitude is a constant.

Were there any particular teachers at school who motivated and perhaps influenced you?

At high school Barbara Bateman was a passionate advocate for painting. She made it seem an entirely legitimate career option - which was a rare thing really. I remember receiving a lot of flack from the staff when I dropped Physics and French so that I could do another Art subject in year 12. Barbara and my French teacher were the only ones who didn’t think that was a crazy choice. That cultural support is vital and deeply moving.

Were you inspired, as a young artist, by any well-known Australian or International artists?

When I was very little we had a jigsaw puzzle of a Vincent Van Gogh bedroom painting. I adored it. I remember feeling the love it exuded, the particularity of the forms and textures, the embrace of the space very keenly.

I see almost all the colours of the rainbow in your landscapes. Tell us about the colour palette that you use and why?

For me, colour conveys a lot of the meaning or content in a painting. It is the sensual, somatic (bodily) intelligence of the painting and very often uncovers a state of being that I’m only vaguely conscious of. I generally start with a feeling for what the colour needs to be from the process of drawing, but this can change in response to the presence of the motif. I usually work with a full colour palette and try to just paint and respond, allowing the painting to lead colour choices - at some point it begins to make some sense and make demands, perhaps for high contrast, quiet singing greys, close tonal shifts, an ordering of the language to convey a felt response.

I’ve heard that you don’t ever sit in your studio painting the landscape, and that you drag your canvases out into
the bush with a swag of paints. Is this true? Can you tell us about an average day painting in the bush?

At the moment I have the luxury of painting in the bush on Mum’s farm. I arrive at my studio after school drop off,
get changed and grab a few things, brushes and a canvas or two and head out to work (perhaps a cuppa on the way).
I can leave my easel, palette and a box of paints and mediums out in the bush - it is a great time saving luxury. In
warm weather I eat lunch out at work, in winter I often need to thaw out so that I can manage another session. The 
day is far too short with school pick up the other end.

I’ve even heard it said that you climb a ladder (similar to those that fruit pickers use) to get closer to nature. Is this also true?

No, it comes from Sacha Grishin’s visit many years ago. He was struck by my rusty easel, a repurposed fruit picking ladder (Dad had commercial fruit crops in the 60’s) - essentially a free, tall A frame against which I could lean or hang my canvases. I didn’t climb it! I’ve since built myself an adjustable aluminium version that means I can straddle or stand on logs when necessary.

Ramble has to be your most brilliant work so far – your magnum opus – would you agree? Tell us about your vision for this work, the painting of this work and are you happy with the resulting painting?

Brilliant, I’m not so sure. It is certainly the nuttiest thing I’ve attempted. For ten years or so I’d been drawing around the problem of how to make a work that conveyed the somewhat episodic nature of looking; the sense of looking out but being aware of what is to the right, or above, or what one has just passed. Looking unfolds over time, it is not photographic or cinematic, it is laced with felt responses. I made two long charcoal drawings that allowed me to play with the idea, and some smaller scale paintings that had an episodic or progressive sense in them. During 2017 I made a lot of drawings and a long pencil drawing of a composition I quite liked that had the kind of rhythms and pacing I was after. I was toying with the idea of making a painting with that composition but dismissed it as ridiculous when I made the translation of scale - it seemed important to make it of a physical scale and that meant something like 1.8 x 19m. Too silly big. Then a friend asked if I had a painting for an exhibition. 

I was quite excited by the last part of my drawing so I made a painting of that spot, half way through I told her I hoped it wouldn’t sell as it was going to be the end of my silly big painting. Essentially, the scale felt right, the kids (twins) were heading into grade 2 and were settled enough for me to have a crack at it. I took a deep breathe, refused to think about the scale of it (mostly because it seemed embarrassing and just a wee bit terrifying) ordered the linen and stretchers and got stuck into it. I worked quickly across all the canvases blocking or drawing in the main forms then started at the left side and resolved each section fairly intensely before moving on. The most terrifying part was perhaps the last section which had to make the join to the already resolved last two panels. Actually, the lead up to hanging it at Australian Galleries was excruciating as I hadn’t really been able to see it in my studio and didn’t know if it worked. It was a great relief to see it up.

I’m still frankly a bit uneasy about the scale of Ramble, but I am pleased and somewhat surprised to have made it. I was pleased to see it again in the Whitehorse Artspace, I’ve been going through a very tough patch, lots of false starts and fails, floundering - it was a pleasant shock to think that I had made it. What I do appreciate about it is that it feels like an epic love poem, a celebration of the bush I love, where I am at home. 

I have seen some of your meticulous drawings of the landscape and wonder if it is from these that you ‘flesh out’ your paintings, or are they another form of art that you create purely for their own sake?

When I’m searching for a new motif I wander around a great deal and draw compulsively until something makes some sense, meets a need. I draw then to test that motif, to assess if there is enough to hold my interest, to warrant launching into a painting. After that I draw to sort out a composition - or perhaps to solve problems that I’m not sure how to tackle in paint. Those two long charcoal drawings were just that, exploring what might be possible in an image, what would hold together and convey what I wanted - things that I didn’t necessarily know how to paint.

Do you often draw in the open?

Always. (There’s a bit of footage of me making a few marks on a drawing after I had glued sheets together, reasserting the smudged bits, that might confuse people.) Unless I’m drawing or painting something or someone in the studio I draw and paint outside. For me the pleasure of drawing and painting is being present, conveying sensations that arise in relation to the presence of those particular forms in that particular space. It is also just a delight to be in the bush. It is where I feel most at ease, most open and responsive.

It is great to see you experimenting with other mediums to represent the bush. What inspired you to try this medium?

My friend Shane Kent started a ceramic school SoCA (School of Clay and Art) and insisted that I drop in and have a  play. I was seduced by the sensuality of clay itself and the generous and curious atmosphere of SoCA. I floundered around for quite a while, attempted to make little sculptures of forms in the bush, until I realised that they were devoid of what is essential for me; a sense of the intertwining, the interconnectedness of forms in space. It was great fun to make a little sculpture of a tree fern, but without a sense of how far away it was, how close the forms behind it were, what my point of view was, it seemed untrue and implied a strange scale, as though it were a model of a form rather than an experience of its presence. I reverted to shallow pictorial space, in which all of those things are more readily conveyed.

So far, you have created very delicate works in porcelain and paper clay. Have you considered working with other clay bodies to create more robust larger works?

It feels like a new drawing medium to me, a means of haptically drawing out the forms and spaces. I’m also such a rank amateur and beginner - perhaps in time.

Is working with clay something that you will continue to do?

Yes! I’m in the process of cleaning up a tumble down old shed to make a ceramic studio. In time it will house the smallest electric kiln, perfect to learn and play.

How satisfying is it for you to use different medium? Are there other media that you are also yearning to include
in your practice?

It was one of the best things for my confidence; it gave me the sense that the content I’m interested in is not solely a corollary of the mediums I use. I’m interested in how different media are read, how pencil drawings sit quietly and draw a viewer into their space, how paintings proceed and embrace, how the ceramic work occupies a space somewhere in between with a greater sense of the relationship of vision to touch. I’d quite like to try other media for that reason, that they have a different presence, occupy a viewer’s space in differing ways. Your gorgeous Cresside Collette tapestry here makes me itch even more to have a play with that - though I’m not sure I have the patience! I’ve been trying to make work with watercolour as I think my work tends to be on the heavy or gluggy (technical term) side, it would be nice to be confident enough to maintain the luminosity of the white ground, tricky for a prevaricator and obsessive corrector like me. 

How important to you was studying at Monash University, in Art & Design?

I had a terrific cohort of fellow students at Monash, and staff who didn’t actively discourage me from painting - unusual then and now. That foundation in combination with nine months at the New York Studio School then a Masters by research back at Monash was wonderful. At the Studio School we discussed painting as a poetic language of profound meaning, in Masters we were asked to question why we would bother using such an antiquated medium. Fabulous on both counts.

I imagine that during your time at Monash your peers would have been painting very different subject matter to
you. Is this true and if so, was it difficult for you to maintain your passion for the landscape when your peers (and
possibly the academic faculty) were concerned with other subject matter?

Through undergrad and honours I was painting portraits and still life images. Rather ironically, I first worked in the landscape in New York City, finding solace and some solitude in Central Park.

Was there an academic at Monash who inspired you? If so, who and why?

Geoff Dupree. He’s a dear friend and a gifted teacher who taught us painting for a semester in my first year in a wonderful structured way. He is one of those people who can pose a question, discuss a simple matter and allude to a great deal more. He encouraged and challenged me and pushed me to be brave enough to seize the opportunities that came my way.

Did you feel like you established a definitive artistic style early in your practice, during your years at Monash?

I’m not sure one ever feels that - a style. It is just a matter of working, style is a by-product, rather like ones accent or finger prints.

We’ve heard that Australian Galleries nurtured your talent from an early stage. Can you tell us about the importance of this association and what their encouragement and backing has meant to you throughout your career as an artist?

It isn’t a galleries job to nurture talent, the work and its development is the artist’s job; theirs is to represent it and all being well to sell it to provide money for materials and more work. Australian Galleries, Stuart and his wonderful staff have always been very supportive and have never suggested what work I should make or exhibit. I suspect I take that relationship for granted a bit as I’ve always been lucky to sell enough work to cover materials costs. That success has been a huge boon, it means that I have become accustomed to indulging my instincts for what the work needs, what I need to make without thinking too much about it as a product. I’m very conscious that I’ve been unusually lucky in that respect. I’ve also had the advantage of being able to live very cheaply in the studio near my work and have had my partner’s income to support our family since our children arrived.

Is it important to you who buys your work and where your work is shown? This work here (Ramble) is yet to find a home. Is it important to you that it finds a suitable home and that is will be accessible to the public?

It is important to me that the people who buy it are moved by it and I’m delighted if they want to live with it. I’d love to see Ramble find a permanent public, or publicly accessible home but I’m not convinced that it will find any home, its scale makes that difficult.

You have written that it was your father who passed on to you his ‘deep attachment to the landscape’. Did you know, inherently, that you would become an artist from an early age and paint the landscape?

No, it really didn’t seem an option until high school when I used oil paint for the first time - it felt like something I’d done before, that I had some inherent capacity for. Though I do remember I made before and after paintings of the bush following Ash Wednesday which was perhaps an early indication that I needed to paint to make sense of my life.

Where does one of our finest contemporary landscape artists go to from here?

I’m not entirely sure to be honest. I have an idea of what I’d like to do but I’m not sure it isn’t just ridiculous. Time will tell. I will say that in concert with, or perhaps as part of this next work I’m mapping the biodiversity of the immediate environs (roughly 200m around my spot); attempting to record the flora and fauna, the plants, birds, animals and bugs that I’m sharing it with. It is a humbling experience and lesson in how ill-informed I am, I have no idea which species of mozzies, leeches and march (horse) flies bite me, let alone which dragonflies are pupating in the little dam just up the hill. We’ve found freshwater clams that can live for forty years! - I’m aided and abetted in that project by four nine year olds which is enormous fun.