Selected as a Finalist in the 2025 Muswellbrook Art Prize, this large landscape painting of the MacDonnell Ranges reflects both the vastness and spiritual depth of the Central Australian desert. Created in my Blue Mountains studio, it has been exhibited in galleries across New South Wales.
In 2024, I travelled to Central Australia to connect deeply with the land at the heart of this ancient country. The landforms and expansive space offered a confrontation with my limits, as well as with the finiteness of life itself. I was drawn to the silent presence of ghost gums in creek beds, the deep shadows of gorges, and the wide, unbroken sky above.
This painting emerged from dreams in which I embodied the land—becoming the very mountain range, the bluffs, and valleys that I had encountered. The piece speaks to a soulful connection with the landscape, as it merges the physical with the spiritual, transcending mere representation.
The deep shadows of the gorge, the sweeping form of the mountain range, and the heat haze on the horizon evoke both the raw power and the spiritual serenity of the desert.
Medium: Oil paint on stretched canvas, ready to hang
Location: Ormiston Gorge, West MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia
Subject: Desert Mountain Range of my Dreams
Colour Palette: Ultramarine, cobalt blue, red ochre, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, burnt umber, Flinders violet
Selected Works
Landscapes of the MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia
The MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia occupy a significant place within the Australian landscape, both geographically and culturally. This body of oil paintings emerges from sustained engagement with the region’s desert environment, developed through direct observation and subsequent studio-based work.
The paintings respond to the scale, light, and spatial intensity of the Red Centre, where vast distances and exposed landforms shape a heightened awareness of physical and perceptual limits. Within this environment, desert conditions become a framework through which questions of space, solitude, and duration are explored through painting.
These works reflect on the continued relevance of Australia’s central desert regions at a time of environmental and social change, where relationships between people and landscape are increasingly mediated by distance, technology, and altered patterns of connection to place.
Falling Upwards
Falling Upwards explores states of instability and recovery, considering the relationship between collapse, renewal, and the processes through which meaning is constructed through lived experience. The works reflect on tension between intimacy and scale, and the ways in which physical and emotional states can be held and resolved within the language of painting.
Developed through oil painting as a material and perceptual process, the series focuses on how surface, gesture, and atmospheric depth can register shifting internal conditions alongside observed landscape form.
This series of large-scale landscape paintings is available for acquisition. The works are presented in domestic and contemporary interior contexts to provide a sense of scale and material presence within lived environments.
Warrumbungle & Wollemi National Parks Series
This series of landscape paintings was developed during plein-air excursions to Warrumbungle and Wollemi National Parks, where the artist engaged with the natural environment through both direct observation and reflective painting practice.
The works capture the distinctive features of these regions, from the striking rock formations to the subtle textures of bark, rock, and lichen. The artist’s initial focus on monumental landforms shifted as the landscape revealed more intimate details—cloud cascades in the evening sky, still stands of trees, and shifting atmospheric conditions. These elements were reinterpreted through oil painting, where surface, light, and space interact.
The paintings explore how a landscape, while initially defined by its iconic features, can transform through sustained attention to its subtler components. The series reflects the artist’s ongoing investigation into the relationship between observed environment and internal reconstruction through painting.
Below are the available works from this series, offering a continued engagement with the landscapes of Warrumbungle and the Blue Mountains.
Landscape Paintings from the Capertee Valley and the Blue Mountains
This series of landscape paintings captures the diverse and expansive environments of the Capertee Valley and the Blue Mountains. The works range from swift alla prima sky studies to more meticulously developed paintings of dense bushland, each reflecting the unique character of the Australian landscape.
The alla prima sky paintings are created with rapid, gestural brushwork, emphasizing the ever-changing light, colour, and form of the sky. These works focus on the fleeting moments of atmospheric change, exploring how nature’s immediacy can be conveyed through spontaneous mark-making.
In contrast, the bushland paintings are developed over weeks, allowing for a deeper exploration of space and texture. These works engage with the dense, layered nature of the bush, where space seems to recede into complexity. Through careful attention to detail and structure, these paintings invite the viewer to experience the depth and presence of the land, offering a grounded, intimate connection to the environment.
The plein-air studies, created on location in the Blue Mountains and Capertee Valley, reflect the majesty and stillness of these places, capturing the shifting light and colour in confident, direct brushstrokes. These works engage with the landscape as both an observed reality and a space for emotional and perceptual exploration.
Glenbrook Lagoon, Blue Mountains
This series of paintings focuses on the landscape of Glenbrook Lagoon, a site of both tranquility and transformation. The works explore the interplay between water, land, and sky, highlighting the subtle shifts in light, texture, and atmosphere that define this unique environment.
The paintings capture the dynamic forms of the lagoon’s shifting sands, soft muddy banks, and spiky reeds. Water birds, often small and inconspicuous, are depicted within the context of this delicate ecosystem, emphasizing their role in the broader landscape.
Through oil painting, these works investigate the rhythm of the landscape, where the stillness of the water contrasts with the movement of light and natural forms. The trees in the scene provide a grounding force, connecting the viewer to the steady presence of the environment, while the expansive water and sky suggest a sense of openness and continuity.
These paintings offer an opportunity to engage with the lagoon as a site of both reflection and environmental complexity.
This work extends an investigation into landscape as a site of perceptual instability, where reflection, obstruction and inversion disrupt a fixed reading of place. The composition is structured around the surface of water, which operates not as a passive mirror but as an active field that doubles, distorts and reconfigures the image.
Darkened trees form a threshold at the foreground, simultaneously framing and limiting access to the lagoon and sky beyond. This creates a tension between invitation and resistance, where the viewer is held at the edge of the scene rather than fully entering it.
The reflective surface produces a near-symmetry that unsettles orientation. Sky, foliage and water collapse into one another, allowing the image to oscillate between clarity and dislocation. The landscape becomes ambiguous—less a stable location than a shifting perceptual experience.
While grounded in Glenbrook Lagoon in the Blue Mountains, the work reconstructs an internal state rather than documenting a specific view. It engages with moments where perception falters and the familiar becomes uncertain, shaped by memory, reflection and psychological space.
Medium: Oil paint on stretched canvas
Location: Glenbrook Lagoon, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia
Subject: Reflections of trees, sky and clouds in a lagoon
Colour palette: Ultramarine, indigo, phthalo blue, yellow-green, burnt umber, black, white
Evoking the Elements – Earth, Air, Water, Fire
This series of paintings is developed in response to selected piano compositions by composers including Debussy, Ravel, and Chaminade. The works explore how musical structure, rhythm, and tonal atmosphere can be translated into visual form through painting, with particular attention to elemental themes of earth, air, water, and fire.
The series is informed by sustained observation of the landscape of the Lower Blue Mountains, where ongoing exposure to natural processes of change—growth, erosion, fire, and regeneration—shapes an understanding of environment as dynamic and continuously evolving.
These conditions are considered through painting as interconnected systems rather than symbolic narratives, where transformation and equilibrium are registered through surface, gesture, and tonal variation.
The works engage with the relationship between sound, landscape, and material process, translating musical and environmental structures into visual terms.
Selected works from the series remain available for acquisition.
