I completed a degree in fine art majoring in painting in 1989 at Queensland College of Art. Over 7 years time there, I completed three courses, worked at the College and elsewhere teaching elementary and life drawing TAFE courses. In December ‘89 I came back to the South West with my wife and young family. My wife and I started a screen printing and design business in Busselton. Through the 90’s we entered the state screen print awards with many awards for excellence. The business continued until we both retired at the end of 2021. For about seven years prior to retiring, I was designing and hand-making wrought iron gifts and household items that sold well through our Art2Iron website. I have a hearing disability, I am completely deaf without my hearing aids and assistive technologies. In 2021 I had a small stroke resulting in epilepsy, forcing me to quit blacksmithing and get back to painting. I have been active as a painter over the past thirty years but have had no opportunity to be full time as I am now. In my current paintings I am using forest scenes with varying degrees of realism and abstraction with each new work being a combination of what came before. I work without any clear plan; much of the time it is completely automatic and when I pause to look, the painting tells me what needs doing next. When it stops talking, it’s done. The underlying theme of my work is a combination of my experiences with deafness, epilepsy, medications, time in the forest, mindfulness, life, the universe and everything. I’m interested in the way things relate one to another; when considered as the contents of consciousness everything is one but the breeze moves the leaves, the sun heats the ground, light casts shadows, there is an impassable gulf between the world and the mind. The spirals in my work are references to the golden proportion and the main compositional elements in the paintings fall on the golden section. The golden section 1: 0.618034… is an irrational number - it occurs everywhere in nature from bee’s eyes to flowers, faces and more. I find that fascinating and irresistible. A painted image is an abstract two dimensional transformation of fluid mental states into a concrete personal visual language. Trees swaying in the breeze say nothing about anything other than trees swaying in the breeze. It is only when they are put to canvas or made into words that they become meaningful statements whether or not they are understood as intended.