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The painting of abstract landscapes and waterscapes naturally evolved out of my more realistic paintings.This also led me to painting sky-scapes – and the flight of clouds.

During this time my painting transitioned to become more of an expression of the essence of a place through paint and colour.

The painting of  water in all its forms and colours obsessed me during this time, and continues to obsess me.

This has naturally resulted in a somewhat green and blue painting phase, in contrast to my early obsession with red.

I use a number of techniques: palette knife, washes, paint poured onto canvas and squeezing paint direct from the tube onto the canvas. This is what I call the true creative painting process ‘of whatever works’.To be successful the painting has to have feeling. ©

I have felt compelled to paint the Australian landscape by the wide blue skies, the red and ochre rocky outcrops and the clear light.

My paintings come from my memories of the outback , the clear light, the smell of eucalyptus, hot days and the sound of parrots settling in for the night.

 My paintings express  ‘my dream’ of the landscape; they are not quite abstract and yet not quite realistic either.

 I use paints of bright dazzling red and yellow ochres through to the  sun leached colours of midday and those special  moody purples, so much a part of the Australian landscape.

 Through the process of painting,  I have gained a greater understanding of the beauty of the Australian landscape and the love of country expressed by the traditional owners through their stories. ©

During this phase I wanted to understand more deeply how colours related to one another. This was really a painting experiment.

I decided to use no more than two initial colours for each painting; I then commenced to paint freely with the first colour on a blank canvas using different intensities of the first colour. I did this without any concept in mind of what I wanted to paint. Following the application of the first colour, I separately applied the second colour onto the canvas in much the same way.

By using limited key colours in this way, I wanted to see what might be naturally created. I wanted to see if certain colours had characteristics that resulted in specific forms. I also wanted to see how my intuition responded to the chosen colours and the painting that was created in this way.

It was fun and the results were unexpected. For example: when I combined ultramarine blue with crimson; a mystical character that looked a little like Krishna on a horse emerged from the canvas; when I combined phalo green with purple a large fish emerged and I later added crimson red that looked like coral.

Using this method was artistically freeing and I enjoyed the process and the paintings created.

My red phase merged into my abstract phase. In my abstract phase, I tackled my understanding of abstraction.

I found the painting of abstract form and colour was more challenging than I had originally thought.

I used my palette knife and various experimental techniques as a way of expressing myself. I came to realise that the shape of the canvas was very important in the creation of the abstract painting.

I found I used all my senses, not just my intellect, to determine where and how I would structure a painting to communicate an abstract idea through shape and colour. Geometric shapes had new meaning, particularly squares that came to represent land and countries.

This was a new experience for me, which I enjoyed.

I worked on my paintings until they ‘sat well with me’. Knowing when to stop painting was important, that knowledge has stayed with me ever since.

I also discovered that my finished abstract paintings resonated when they triggered a feeling in the viewer- even if that experience was hard for them to describe because it sat just out side of their conscious reach.

With that personal knowledge, I realised that I had discovered the power of paintings to bypass the conscious thought and tap into the unconscious. Was this the collective unconscious Jung referred to.

My abstract phase transformed to other stages of painting.- but that’s another story .

Extract for Wikipedia Abstraction (art) Typically, abstraction is used in the arts as a synonym for abstract art in general. Strictly speaking, it refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world—it can, however, refer to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world, or indeed, another work of art.^[13] Artwork that reshapes the natural world for expressive purposes is called abstract; that which derives from, but does not imitate a recognizable subject is called nonobjective abstraction. In the 20th century the trend toward abstraction coincided with advances in science, technology, and changes in urban life, eventually reflecting an interest in psychoanalytic theory.^[14] Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs.^[15]

Jung and Archetypes

Jung argued that a collective unconscious and archetypal imagery were detectable in art. His ideas were particularly popular among American Abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s.[13] His work inspired the surrealist concept of drawing imagery from dreams and the unconscious.