For the past two years Davida Allen and her doctor husband, Michael Shera, have been living in a studio in the middle of a cow paddock. From the window they can see the family house where their four daughters were raised, and the large, flat building that serves as Michael's clinic. Although situated in a rural area just outside of Ipswich, Queensland, there is a never-ending stream of patients driving in for consultations.

Allen, once known as the housewife superstar of Australian art, helps out one day a week in the clinic. The rest of the time she is doing something that assuages her restless creativity. In recent years she has directed a film and written a novel - each a free-flowing blend of autobiography and fantasy.

"Moving into this studio has been a complete romance for me," she says. "Now that the children have grown up and left home, I wanted to live with the pictures. So I've got the luxury of being able to wake up in the morning to a half-finished painting. I may work for an hour, then go and do all the other jobs one does as a woman and a domestic human being."

Allen wakes to the smell of oil paint with the same kind of rapture that others wake to the smell of fresh coffee. For her the addiction of painting is closely related to the smell. "I'm an oil painter," she says. "I hate the smell of acrylic, but I really need the smell of oil. One of the things I missed when making a film, was that smell."

Her approach to painting is totally spontaneous. She works whenever the mood takes her, with no planning or preparation. "I work intermittently. I might paint for a whole day, or right through the night. And then I could go for three weeks, sometimes six months, without doing anything. It's an emotional outpouring, so I have to wait till I'm panic-stricken that there's no time left before a show. Usually this works."

She likens painting to pregnancy. "You've gone nine months, and then the birth can be really quick. A lot of the painting doesn't happen on the board, it happens inside your head and you live with it for ages. I can actually do a painting in about ten minutes or over a three-week period."

"Inspiration to an artist is simply air. You can't see it, you can't touch it, but you're totally dependent on it. And when you aren't inspired you can't force it."

At the time of our visit Allen was inspired by the vista of trees and cows she saw from the window of the studio. Now that the children have gone, she is less of a "domestic expressionist", and more a landscape painter. Twenty years ago she was painting pictures of babies, and then a notorious series of sexual fantasies about the actor, Sam Neill.

She paints quickly with her fingers, all her subjects and colours being determined by emotional factors. A sky may be bright blue or bright red, depending on her mood. It is a hit and miss method, and Allen estimates that she burns a third of her total output, taking great satisfaction from these regular bonfires.

"When I'm painting," she says, "I just want to get rid of something that's inside my head, whether it be joy, angst, pain, or whatever. The audience comes in when the works are framed. And then - emotionally - you walk around stark naked, because everyone, either in a show or in your studio, is looking at these pictures."

John McDonald

View the full list of artists photographed by R. Ian Lloyd