I’ve always felt that the important thing is to concern oneself with form, and I think that’s always been my aim, to produce colours and shapes and lines that seem to me to be satisfying, and that if I did that well enough then, because I’m a human being, then I would express the things that I want to express, and I think that my work is always concerned with the Australian landscape, things that I saw and experienced as a child in Western Queensland; the red dry earth that’s cracked in the drought times, the burnt scrub after the bushfires. I think these are the things that my work is mainly concerned with, but that is almost by the way, what I worry about are the shapes and the colours.
I usually begin by drawing. I make lots of drawings. I don’t think about anything in particular, merely to fill pages with lines and with tones. Some of them don’t come to anything but others seem to have possibilities that I probably make into paintings later. The tones that I use – usually the drawings are in black and white – the tones suggest to me the colours that I put into the paintings. I used to work very slowly but recently I’ve discovered a new medium which enables me to work very quickly.
