Gallery 6 - Marine Etiquette

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- Homage To Babel
- Hydrangea Storm
- Specimens
- Tea With Icarus
- The Botanist
- The Meal

The Coastline Of Desire

The nostalgic romantic look to the exhibition is the result of my continuing fascination with 18th and 19th century European paintings. Most of the images were mentally collaged from Dutch and English still life and marine paintings yet my subject matter focuses on contemporary society and my private obsessions.

These paintings continue various narratives from my earlier works using a cast of familiars. Many commentators find my work surreal however I like to think they are missing the point somewhat. Recently in New York it was said I took a "Swiftian" notion of the world (Jonathan Swift, the satirist, was author of "Gulliver's Travels"). Perhaps this comment was due to the Lilliputian stature of my people in a Brobdingnagian world. But I like to think it was perhaps referring to the essentially absurdist tradition we both inhabit.

I'm afraid people, and I include myself here, spend most of their time like King Canute in the pursuit of the futile or the impossible. We must control the uncontrollable or find a way to say the unsayable. I believe communication is rarely if ever possible, yet unlike Samuel Beckett I find the whole enterprise glorious, a thing not to be missed.

In 1998 my family alnd I moved from the Pacific rim to the Atlantic edge. We settled on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, in a community of Baymen. Most days I walk the beaches. At the local university I taught Marine Biologists how to draw and illustrate their observations.

In my last Australian series the sea formed an essential emotive and metaphoric backdrop to my work. It was "the amniotic other place" where sexualized dreams of forbidden genders might be formed.

I have allowed myself the luxury of revisiting old preoccupations- communication and the domestic - but looking at it from where I am now. It is a place of storms and sweeping beauty. In the paintings the sea has tossed up the flotsam and jetsam of our everyday passions, men struggle vainly to be more than ineffectual, flowers are always beautiful and tea can still calm troubled waters.

These works are a gentle whimsy on all this.

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