A whole summer was spent trying to shape a boat out of a log with a crude chisel and hammer. I crept through a hole in our neighbour’s fence everyday. I was eight years old.
In our neighbourhood there were often birthday parties that involved drawing competitions. My drawings always won and the adults smiled knowingly at me.
When we moved to a country town I created a world of billy carts made from stuff from the local tip, elaborate cubby houses in pine trees, and below ground, and bows and arrows whittled with a red pen knife. Pegs and bottle tops added to oil paint became exotic birds. When I went to High School I built a big aviary onto the side of our house. Canaries, zebra finches and budgerigars everywhere. I felt the colour of their wings on my eyes.
When I left home and went to Art School, drunks and prostitutes entered my paintings. One painting was of a Maltese girlfriend named Mary Anne, sitting naked on a sea grass mat, eating olives out of a huge pressure cooker positioned between her legs.
Later, when I was working as a scenic artist for TV in Melbourne an older woman with three young children wanted me all for herself. I painted a portrait of her sitting on a stool in a red top, imaginary animals filling the background, and moved to another city.
When I married my art works and assemblages became brighter in colour and bolder compositionally. Travel and family holidays on the south coast of NSW informed and enriched my work. Knobbly bits of timber and twists of driftwood turned into horses and birds. One work, a large shell of driftwood, metal and old curved chairs was big enough for my four year old son to sit in.
Now my artist wife and I still discover and collect. Picking something up in the bush or on the high tide line, our eyes meet and we know what we are thinking instinctively. Yes, that bit of bleached blue plastic will be a cloud. A king parrot. A sleeping baby. An owl. Something I have never seen before.