About me
I am a painter based in Castlemaine, in central Victoria.
I have been working consistently on my art since 2004. From 2004 to 2011, I experimented with collage and pen drawing. From 2013 to 2020, I made large multi-sheet en plein air drawings and paintings on paper in the landscape, using a range of drawing media, ink and watercolour. I showed these landscape works in art prizes and in solo shows.
In 2021, I decided to concentrate solely on portraiture because I believed this would offer me the greatest potential for self-expression and development as a painter. Since then I have focused on self-portraits and portraits of my husband, artist Mark Dober.
I paint my portraits from life. I value the immediacy and intensity that comes from painting directly from the subject in my studio. This involves two key steps: selective looking and translation of what I see into paint. Out of this process a personal expression arises because I am seeing and translating in my own way. The image is created through the process, not prior to beginning. Each painting takes up to 6 weeks to make: the painting gradually evolves as an accumulation of brushmarks and patches of colour and tone. The paintwork records my perceptual adventure.
Whilst I am focused on the process, I want my portraits to have a psychological weight. I want there to be a sense that the person depicted is a conscious, thinking being. I seek to project my subject into the realm of the viewer’s space, and this is helped by the fact that the scale of all my portraits is larger than life.
In each work I seek to develop my portrait painting further, making incremental changes in scale, composition, colour, tone and imagery. I see my studio practice as an investigation into a genre which has great depth and possibility.
The modernist portrait painters of the past are my greatest inspiration, as I see my work fitting the modernist-realist tradition in Western art. I am particularly interested in the work of Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Picasso, Lucian Freud and Stanley Spencer. In 2022, I went to London to study the work of both Cezanne and Freud in major exhibitions at Tate Modern and the National Gallery of London respectively.