About

I was born in Melbourne in 1971. My father was a painter, though he didn't begin as one. He and my mother started out making dried flower arrangements and selling them to shops around the city, and one of my earliest memories is sitting in the back of an old Kingswood station wagon packed with them, on the way to market. Then one day, my father hung two of his first oil paintings in the front window of the house. A man walking past stopped, tapped on the window, and asked how much the pair cost. That was all it took. He never arranged another flower.

From then on, I grew up in a house that smelled of oil paint and turpentine. My father painted in a room off the living area, sometimes finishing ten works in a day to keep up with the galleries, and he was always happy to let me sit near him while he worked. There was never a lesson. He never once tried to teach me. I was just glad to be close to it, absorbing the way a serious life could be built out of paint and quiet.

As a boy, I spent whole afternoons up in the big trees on our property, perched there like a bird, watching the world from above. I didn't understand it then, but I was already gathering the things that would fill my paintings forty years later.

My first love was not painting. It was music. I grew up on The Beatles and Pink Floyd coming through my father's enormous sound system, and when I was a teenager, Prince arrived and showed me what it looked like to be completely yourself and answer to no one. I picked up the guitar, and for years in my twenties, I recorded my own music alone in the back of my mother's gallery. The pieces I play under my videos today come from that time. I also acted for a while and once played Hamlet in a school production, loving every minute of it. Slowly, I was learning the one thing that has stayed true ever since: that I do my best work alone.

It wasn't until my late twenties that I finally picked up a brush myself. No one suggested it. I simply started, with no real idea what I was doing, teaching myself how to hold a brush and mix a colour from scratch. My father only ever offered me a single piece of advice in all those years. He looked at an early, clumsy landscape I had made, pointed at a row of small buildings on the horizon and said, "I like that bit, why not do more of that?" So I did. I painted those buildings from the horizon down to the bottom of the board, and a style of my own began to form.

I sent a few of those first paintings to a gallery, and they sold straight away. After a lifetime of never earning a cent from anything I had made, I was hooked, and I have painted ever since.

Even in those first months, I remember spreading paint across a board just to see what it would do, and sensing that something was hiding in those loose, accidental backgrounds. I didn't have the skill to finish them then. It has taken me the better part of thirty years to learn how.

Around the time I moved to Brisbane, I met my wife, Sarah, online. My username was Blankcanvas71, which turned out to be truer than I knew. We built a home and a family together, and they are the centre of everything.

For a long stretch of my life, I painted in my father's shadow, always trying to make work that looked nothing like his. It took me years to understand that I had never been copying him. I was carrying something forward. The loose, poured backgrounds I first glimpsed as a beginner are the ground my Outback Fantasy paintings now stand on, and I finally know how to finish what I saw all that time ago. That messy, luminous beginning has become the most natural and most honest version of everything I do.

These days, I am not painting buildings, or beaches, or anything chosen because it might sell. I am painting the things that actually mean something to me. Two figures who represent my family. Cockatoos. A glowing, uncertain landscape. The mystery of being alive, and the conviction that whatever real happiness we find has to come from within.

I have given my life to this. From a boy sitting in a tree, to a boy sitting quietly in his father's studio, to the work I make now, it has all been one long road, and every painting comes from the whole of it.

 

Why Original Art?

When you buy a book, you are holding a copy. When you stream a song, you are hearing a copy. When you buy a print, you are looking at a copy.

But when you buy an original painting, something completely different happens. You are holding the actual object that the artist created. The same surface their hands touched. The exact marks their brush made. The paint they mixed on that specific day, in that specific light, in that particular moment of their life that will never come again. Some of those moments carry more than the viewer will ever know.

A painting is one of the very few things in the world where the original and the artwork are the same object. It cannot be replicated, streamed, or reprinted. It exists once, in one place, and then it belongs to you.

That is more than a purchase. It is a connection across time between two human beings. The one who made it and the one who chose to live with it.

Every painting in this collection was made by hand, made fearlessly, and exists only once in the world. When it finds its home, it takes a little piece of its story with it and adds a new chapter to yours.