Melbourne
I paint because it slows me down.
Artworks: 7
Hi, thanks for taking the time to visit my studio. Here you’ll find a snapshot of my art practice over the last couple of years; if you have any specific questions then please get in touch.
I’m trained as a cinematographer with a sub-specialism in underwater camera work and have won multiple peer-judged cinematography awards. So while my career has been about creating the image, that image has only recently become painting.
Cinematography is always about composition, colour, chroma, and exposure.
And that translates into my art practice as I balance the elements of camera work and illustration to produce paintings of my main subject – the quotidian; or, the ordinary and everyday of life.
And they are playful.
They’re exploring the premise that beauty exists everywhere, in the joy of the everyday, in the bones of the people we love,; and it’s about revealing the scars and cracks that exist by being human, to share what isn’t always shown.
And to celebrate those signs of existence that reveal a life lived.
My ‘being human’ has always been about mountains, climbing, hiking, camping, and exploring…
…until 2018 – only the second time in my life that I needed the support of a health system – I had some surgery that became ‘post-op nerve trauma causing neuropathic pain.
During my three weeks of hospitalisation, the doctors discovered that I’d also developed ‘Latent Autoimmune Disease in Adults’ (LADA).
This discovery was caught just a few weeks before I would have died from LADA as, unwittingly, it was something that I had for about 18 months. So being someone that never needed a GP, I was instantly thrust into an irony that the surgery ultimately saved my life, but it was too late to offset the peripheral neuropathy in both my feet and now hands.
And so I now have, for life multiple points of neuropathic pain and nerve trauma.
It’s all but ended my career as a cinematographer as I can. at times, scream out in sudden and ridiculously excruciating pain.
That’s never a good look when it’s “all quiet on set!”
What do I miss most about camera work? I’ve worked for more than two decades developing an international career as a cinematographer/Director of Photography (DoP) in which I was also the Australian Cinematographers Society NSW State Secretary for seven years, and on the jury of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) for five; but what I miss most is, I miss filming from helicopters!
But I’m resilient, I’ll bounce back from surgical complications and nerve trauma; I’ll keep taking the drugs that make the pain slightly more bearable, but fog my mind like a dolphin swimming through mud.
And three years ago I took to painting in the hope that, as I’m bouncing, I’ll make a successful transition into being a full time artist.
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