I’ve been creating art in Hawai`i for 35 years. I distinctly recognized my art mission when I was a primary school student in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. My life as an artist has been a long and fulfilling journey of seven decades – so far.

For about 15 years before the Covid lockdowns I was all but exclusively doing black and white portrait commissions. This was in public spaces in Honolulu. These charcoal drawings were well executed and creative. Collectors gave me lots of positive feedback and I was paying my bills. But things were nagging at me: a backlog of visions (an impossible projection of colour and canvases), reference photos and sketches gathering dust and an incomplete body of work. I knew I was overstaying.

On March 18, 2020 Waikiki became a ghost town. I packed up my easel in the rain and never returned. Boarded hotel towers, empty streets and beaches were super unsettling to see. I bought an old truck, started the initial conversion to a tiny house. filled it full of studio gear, my art and furniture and shipped it to Kaua’i island.

I had settled on Kaua’i earlier from Sydney. That was 1990. My then-wife, Lisa and our two little girls arrived with high expectations. But in one week into our second year of island life Hurricane Iniki hit, she left (coincidentally), our living situation was pummeled and I suddenly became a single dad. The girls and I took refuse in an upstairs office in Hanalei. I had rented it and planned a gallery but never happened.

It’s been a slow process from pandemic upsets, relocation and making a daunting art transition. I am now in the throws of reestablishing myself as a painter-colourist. I was homeless but had savings to purchased a load of colour tubes, brushes and materials. It’s been consuming in time and available funds to convert the truck as my art shop and living space. I’m now working art-piece to art-piece in my approach I call universalism.

In the 60’s my dad would take me to visit artist Ian Fairweather at his isolated Bribe Island studio. This impressed me greatly. In 1972 I was accepted into a liberal art school in Melbourne. After graduation I had a job as a screen printer. I then became a publisher for a short time for a small inner city newspaper in Brisbane.

I traveled to 40 countries in the eighties, I lapped up most major art museums en route like a crazy man. I got married in New York City. There I worked as the art tutor at the Bronx Museum of Art. I foundered a hands-on multinational art initiative called The Lovelink Project and networked in Moscow during the Cold War.

More details here