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.
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 larger than life scale of my portraits.
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.