Over fifty years I have worked in sculpture, drawing, photography and theatre but always saw myself as a painter. In my teenage years it was all I wanted to do but firstly my school art teacher saw little in what I was doing and decried my use of colour and then in my first year at art school, the tutor I had, said that the school didn’t want me working ‘that’ way, meaning painting based on the real world. Abstract shape making weas [sp] all the go. A further one declared that they might make me an illustrator in time without ever asking what I wanted. It seemed to me that anyone in a position to influence my future as an artist was looking to pigeon-hole me without ever discussing with me anything about art. That continued right through art school where tutors seldom came near me or took any interest. I was surprised when I asked for a reference from the head of the Byam Shaw in London, Geri Morgan, that he even knew who I was and even more so when he wrote that I had promise [and meant it, according to his secretary]. He never said as much. I did wonder who else of my year that he might have considered promising. What I saw on a daily basis was a lot of imitation and later searches suggested that whatever promise my year level held had largely failed to materialise beyond art school. The one exception that I found was Ian Warburton, now ensconced in southern France and still interpreting the landscape.

If they had asked, I might have told them that even then I was trying to make art that was not necessarily tied to a time and a place, so much as timeless. The ideas that I work with haven’t changed much in fifty years.  A common thread that ran through all of the theatre productions was the nature of the solitary individual and the artificial construct of society/civilisation which continually morphed into considerations of time and how we remember the past.

Cy Twombly approached that idea through continually hiding what he had done under layers of white paint. That idea has always appealed to me – visible history through layers – and of course many artists talk about mining their own pasts for inspiration. Getting past the autobiographical, though is difficult. The Minimalists removed the artist completely in a search for something universal and for me, most abstraction lacks a soul, a reason for being beyond just the medium. However, just occasionally something universal emerges. I find that in the work of Tony Tuckson. Seeing the Retrospective a year or so ago was a reminder of just what is possible.

I see much of visual interest everywhere I go and I’ve taken a lot of record photographs but on review have inevitably captured something entirely different from my moment of perception. I remember being in the roof top café on top of Parliament House, Canberra in blazing sunshine. What took my interest were the shadows of the metal chairs but when I had the film developed [long before digital anything] I was looking at a limited environment of which the chairs were only one part. It was both wholly realistic and wholly abstract – both an observed fragment and a greater reality of which I was part. I never knew what to do with that image. The same is true of some pictures I took of water at Port Adelaide docks. I was seeing one thing [I don’t recall what] but the camera was capturing something else in that that speed was so high that the waves were frozen in movement. The pattern was something I couldn’t have seen. When I recently looked at Richter’s work and saw the blown-up images of surfaces I was reminded of an artistic direction I never pursued.

Do I measure myself against the past? Yes and no. I am conscious of everything that has gone before me and the approaches and successes of artists. I’m also conscious of the huge volume of art being put online across the world every day, every hour. It is simply intimidating. For all of that though, none of those artists are me.