Phangna Bay, 2019
Acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 122cm

Acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 122cm

Phangna Bay is a wonderfully scenic area of Thailand where huge limestone karst formations pop straight out of the water. We had sailed there in our yacht Burramys and had rowed our dinghy into a natural tunnel in one island – pitch dark and full of bats! As the tide lowered we could continue to the light at the end of the tunnel and rowed into a small lake in the centre of the island. That was in 1991 before the proliferation of tourist boats. Now, there are so many boats that some islands have been ‘closed’ for regeneration.

Galapagos collection, 2017
Acrylic on canvas, 70cm x 100cm

Galapagos Collection is part of a continuing body of work around a visit to the Galapagos Islands in 2003. Both Charles Darwin and I had visited the Galapagos on small boats as part of a circumnavigation. Darwin’s natural history collection deductions changed world thinking, but my ‘collection’ just plays with the shapes of the animals on the islands and references the Victorian ethos of collecting. The Galapagos is a wonderful place where wildlife is very tame and unafraid of man.

Galapagos Collection was a winner of the ‘Animal Life’ section in the 2017 Kenilworth Prize – something I was very pleased about. But, not everyone was so pleased and thought the award should have gone to something more traditional – and there were plenty of works worthy of the prize (even from my point of view). I was just thankful for a judge who was prepared to give the prize to something a bit less conventional.

To and Fro, 2015
Acrylic on canvas, 60cm x 60cm

The ‘muscle cars’ were coming to Maleny Showground, so I painted To and Fro for a Maleny Art and Craft Group exhibition in their showground building at the same time. I absolutely enjoyed painting it even though it took me forever to find side-on pictures of cars on the internet to get my silhouettes.

Migration of the sea snakes, 2012
Acrylic on canvas, 90cm x 120cm

Originally this painting was to be ‘A day at the beach’ but somehow or other all those sea snakes kept creeping in. I had seen a number of striped sea snakes when sailing, but really had no idea whether sea snakes migrated or not but seeing all but two were heading in the same direction I titled it ‘Migration of the sea snakes’. Apparently some sea snakes do short migrations of a few kilometres from sea to estuary, but generally they don’t.

The Medina
Acrylic on canvas, 90cm x 90cm

We had spent a winter onboard Burramysat Tunisia at Monastir Marina in 1994. Many years later I was looking at Tunisia on Google Earth and found that the medina in Tunis was somewhat boat shaped. I liked this coincidence.