I’ve claimed to have ‘a moving life – here’s how it goes:

Dad’s Irish father owned a sheep station west of Hughenden in north-west Queensland, he married and had 6 children in Australia but then employed a manager and moved back to Ireland when Dad was a toddler. I was born in England just after WW2. Dad was in the navy, so we followed him to some interesting places, too bad I can't remember them! When Dad decided he needed a change from being a career naval officer much soul-searching resulted in our little family moving to Queensland.

I found property life blissful. Ponies, dogs, mustering sheep in wide open spaces. Initially, school arrived by mail truck once a week, but after several years of this, my English mother decided her daughter should go to an English-style boarding school and found one a mere 2,000 km from home – her daughter was not impressed, but was locked into commuting by car, plane, bus and train for the next six years.

After school came university, followed by overseas travel to visit the family and see Europe. Then love interrupted any thoughts of career and I’ve lived for almost 50 years on a cattle property near Glenmorgan in Queensland’s near south-west, helping to run the business while juggling a family of 3 kids.

Living where we lived and without public transport, some sort of travel was mandatory and constant – to visit friends and relations, do business pre-internet days, to go to the doctor. We survived the risks of rural life and raised 3 children while living at the end of a road that could be flooded at any time by several creeks and 2 rivers before you reached a major hospital. Today thank goodness there are rescue helicopters and std or mobile phones, then it was a party-line phone and derring do.

From the time I first held a pencil, art had always been my passion, but school career advisers told me to give it a swerve and stick to academic subjects. I still can’t believe my luck that I found my true pathway in our tiny bush community. I belonged to an art group with some talented members who were a great help, and at about the time that my first child was born the group decided to join Mervyn Moriarty’s Eastaus Art School, the fore-runner to the Flying Art School. History shows this has made wonderful art education available in remote areas of Queensland since the 1970s. Mervyn and his tutors opened doors to creation and information I had never previously been able to imagine.

My first solo exhibition in Toowoomba in 1986 was mind-blowing – here was a gallery that wanted to hang MY paintings – amazing. Even more amazing – they sold well. The same year I went on an artists expedition to the Kimberley led by Clifton Pugh, and on the strength of the paintings I brought back was offered an exhibition in Brisbane with a second the following year. These turned out to be very successful. Marketing is the thing I like least about being an artist. I paint, therefore I am. What happens next is of little importance in the scheme of things, it may be necessary, but just seems immaterial!!!

Our area has several excellent galleries which have given me the opportunity to exhibit my art over the years, and continue to do so.

Although I enjoy isolation and prefer to work alone, I’ve attended many workshops and artist camps to maintain a connection with the wider world of art. All this meant travelling far from home.

Simultaneously, the children were growing up and going to boarding school – our local school was primary only. We also travelled a great deal for business and leisure – campdrafting was my husband’s passion and we loaded the horses and drove wherever competition was offering, occasionally taking a few weeks off and travelling a circuit of events – one of these took us as far as Fitzroy Crossing in WA, for me another re-visit to the Kimberley area. I'd fallen in love with the colours and forms of the scenery on that first trip and keep going back.

My paintings are responses to the Australian landscape, its diversity and its biodiversity, its history and its timelessness. I look at a landscape and it speaks to me, each place is different and the reason that brought me there is different, leading to different approaches to picture-making, different materials and different supports.

I enjoy working in different media. My first love was oils, but I discovered that I’m very allergic to turps. Watercolour is still a mystery to me, but its close relation gouache is very satisfying, and I love to use it together with pastels and inks on paper. Such mixed media works need framing before they can be exhibited, so I’ve made the transition to working in acrylics on linen or canvas and find their versatility very suitable to what I do.

I also like to use naturally occurring ochres - site specific colours with pronounced textures which look wonderful when used together with acrylics. My colours are never 'real' in a photographic sense – they are filtered by my perception of the nature of the subject. 

The weather and time of day give me lights and darks and colours, constantly changing the patterns. Composition, colour, unity and rhythm are the key elements with traditional form and perspective taking a less important place.

We have now retired from running the property, but still live there much of the time, sharing ‘home’ time with a quiet spot on the edge of Toowoomba, a welcome cooler change. A big lifestyle change has been the acquisition of a caravan – previously our travels had been by car or, when we travelled with horses, truck. The caravan provides us with unbelievably luxurious camping conditions – a real bed, a stove, fridge, bathroom! Oh joy! And plenty of storage space for paint and canvas. With freedom to leave the property to a son’s tender care, we take off each year to escape the Queensland winter.

Many paintings are created in 'the car studio' as we travel outback roads bearing in mind that it's the journey that matters rather than the destination. I have used sketch books for many years to record what I see as we move around the country, but this has escalated to creating paintings on rolls of canvas. I wear a plastic apron covered in thick towelling and keep my paints in a box on my knee. My easel is a sheet of foam core balanced on the dash, and the canvas can roll out to any width as long as it isn’t too high to look over! I love to do some of these paintings on a black background, it creates a simpler colour equation where hue takes over from tone. Some of these 'shorthand notes' are complete as they are, others are finalised in the studio, sometimes with more detailed additions eg birds seen along the way.

As we travel, I see mystery in the darks, excitement in the lights, stories in the shapes.The responses to the passing landscapes go in and out of abstraction, some paintings will be more realistic, while others are reduced to lines and patterns. For me there is an overwhelming spirituality encompassed in nature.

Every now and then we stop to roost for a while, so out comes the big canvas roll – what luxury – it doesn’t matter how big - as long as I can find stretcher frames for it when I get home. I find that being sedentary and able to digest one particular view at leisure engenders a different approach and a different result – so I make no apologies for stylistic variations. They are me, each one, in a different mood one from another.

I like to think that my paintings can help people from rural and remote areas who run into trouble, so profits from sales are directed to various charities providing transport and accommodation to those in need and far from home.

Umcheega ---- “If you should find a path untravelled or a place unknown to you, you must travel it until you know it” 

Jeanne Carbonetti  ---- “…the special gift of the landscape form is to answer the basic question about what we know, how we see the world dancing, and how we dance with that partner”

Andrei Makine – Le testament Français --- "The clarity of this country, the transparency, the profundity and the miracle of this meeting of water, stone and light – that is the only knowledge, the first morality. This harmony is not illusory. It is real, and faced with it I feel the necessity of the word."

curriculum vitae