I am a lonely painter...

That's a line from a Joni Mitchell song, in case you thought I was opening up about my personal problems... I'm working on some paintings at the moment, so for lack of anything more immediate, I thought I'd show some of my paintings from the past. Mostly I work in a collage style, i.e. I steal other people's images! For the latest works I'm also going for texture, building up the surface with lots of layers of paint, but sanding it down to get a really flat surface with none of the canvas showing. Some of them are on wood panels, but they'll have the same surface. The works I'm showing today are just the ones that I have at hand and that are webready. At some point in the future I'll add others. It seems I have an endless supply of potential future posts!

This first one is a work I made when I lived in Japan. I think I had just discovered the work of Juan Davila. I was going for pop kitsch with art-historical references. It's called La Joconde aux Croix. The title refers to Fernand Leger's La Joconde aux Clefs, which, if you look at the linked image, is the Mona Lisa with keys. I didn't have any keys, but I had some crosses... The work I was making at the time involved collaging images or items with the (acrylic) paint. The central image of the Mona Lisas is a Warhol work sewn on to the canvas, along with the crucifixes.

This work is a much later painting, or series of paintings. Each dog is painted on a separate panel. This was made for a dog-themed show at PCL Exhibitionists in 2000. I had moved from having a lot of different images crowded together, to one image per panel. I think it's called Let Slip the Dogs of War. The person who has done all my art photographing for the past 7 or 8 years, Adrian Cook, has this work. He also commissioned a similar painting of bunnies which I did with blue paint on white backgrounds. That work has been built up in layers, then sanded back. I wanted it to look a child's bedroom cupboard that had been used for years and was showing signs of age. Do children still have cupboards like that? I have photos of those paintings, too, but not handy.


This was from a time when I was trying to get a lot of texture in paintings. It started off as a mainly-blue painting, with some white bits throughout. It had 'nausea' written in the flat area in the bottom right quadrant. The title is still Nausea, but I decided to cover the whole thing in graphite to emphasize the texture and not the colour. It's mostly acrylic, but mixed media with graphite.This is probably from 2000 or thereabouts.


This one was also from my time in Japan, I think. Well, I started it there, and finished it when I moved to Sydney. It has since been covered over and sanded and used for another work. I was never very happy with it. A lot of collage elements again. The top originally had the purple text that covers the bottom showing, but it got covered up. I think I didn't like that it was so messy and chaotic. Most of my work starts off that way, then gradually becomes ordered and neat. The latest series is going back to this use of background text and foreground painted object, but with the multi-panel simplicity. Even though I don't like some of my early work, I'm showing it to show the evolution of my work.