I’ve been wonderfully pleased with my art career over the decades and still very much looking forward to the best decades to come. I’ve been living in Hawai’i for 34 years and continuing my art interests here since my Australian days.

My first interest is painting although I’ve done hundreds of portrait drawings in recent years on Oahu. My art and painting journey was sparked at about grade 4 growing up in Toowoomba, Australia. Looking back I realize the value of self-esteem that provided. Considering most everything else at the time, art was a life saver and carries through to today (in some ways). By high school I was getting positive notice and won some town art awards. I’ve had an exciting life as an artist and parent, of travel and adventure, of art and activism. 

I was born in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia in 1955. I graduated school and was accepted into the School of Art and Design at Preston Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Victoria.  Preston is now part of RMIT, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Travel
After graduating art school I immersed myself further in art and culture by visiting over forty countries and the great museums of the world. This was during the eighties. I also discovered many off-trail galleries. One may become what they aspire to by exposure to the greats and a lot of self-trial and persistence.

The Victoria and Albert Museum was a favorite museum of mine in London. And in New York I would return many times to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I began feeling a deep connection with the master artists by visiting so many world art halls. My first date with my wife in NY was at the Met.

At that time in 1985 I was an art tutor and guide at the Bronx Museum of Art. The collection there focused on black American art. The groups visiting were black school students from The Bronx and I was shocked that youth even as old as high school level had never been exposed to any art classes. I also worked as a graphic designer at Flax Advertising in Manhattan and as a an office worker for HomeLines Cruises on the 39th floor of Tower One, World Trade Center.

Exhibitions
I have exhibited my work in Toowoomba, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, New York City in the USA, Leysin in Switzerland, Honolulu and Kaua`i in Hawai`i. 

Mentors
In my school days in Toowoomba I set the task of my artistic future by painting in different styles, even from painting to painting. Fortunately my parents encouraged my art interest and had enrolled me in art workshops and the Summer Art Schools at the Darling Downs Institute of Technology and the University of Queensland. These courses attracted tutors who were practicing and nationally recognized artists from all over Australia. 

My most regular mentors were Neville Matthews, Roy Churcher, Mervyn Moriarty, Peter Booth, Dale Hickey. When I was in my early teens my dad would take me to visit Ian Fairweather at his bush-hut studio on Bribie Island. Fairweather died in 1974 and is one of Australia’s most renowned artists. He show a surprising interest in me and I remember him looking like an old hermit but a very distinguished and gentle sole. 

I also had the privilege of meeting Lloyd Rees at his home in Sydney. I’ve always been captivated by these artists’ creative works but also by their sense of human freedom and regard.

Universalism
With the suggestion of the Queensland artists, Matthews, Churcher, Moriarty, I was emboldened to resist becoming style-cast. At 15 years I made it my business to indulged in different art styles and genres; even from work to work. 

I became mostly intrigued with colour and the Impressionists through to Abstraction and Conceptualism. I called my approach Universalism. It was my art direction but began expanding into a philosophy and a way of life. It persists today that mindfully breaks boundaries or overlaps daily pursuits, rolls, jobs and political, spiritual and cultural fields. 

The Lovelink Project
While in New York 1985, I founded The Lovelink Project. Lovelink is a hands-on community art exchange programme predominately focused on children and youth to promote peace, sustainability and justice. It advocates for an array of specific issues through the creation of specific artworks of prosperity, key to our rich and fair survival: free speech, environment, civil rights, corporate restraint, recognition of international law to name some.

Community and Activism
Strange, but I grew up in something of a working democracy. Australia long had public health care, used to have free education which was nothing considered unusual, the world’s highest homeownership and unionism and so on.

But transnational corporations have changed all that. While traveling abroad in the 80s I saw the the gate wide-open for aggressive corporate takeovers. It was no surprise that by the 90s  through the title Globalization had became a known descriptor. Transnationals have eroded democracies, national sovereignties and the Earth itself literally.

My history of activism begins during the Cold War era: protesting the US and Australian war in Vietnam, The Crown and CIA’s involvement in the sacking of socialist Prime Minister Whitlam, Aboriginal and indigenous rights, women’s liberation and nuclear non-proliferation. I have been a supporter of Hawaiian independence since 1990 and an advocate for fair housing and solutions for the homeless epidemic. I coordinated the annual Earth Day program on Kauai island in Hawai`i during the the 90s. I co-founded the Save Waikiki Sidewalk campaign to protect the free speech rights of artists and musicians where being arrested for busking along the main visitor sidewalk. Between 2011 and 2013 I was often encamped at the Honolulu chapter of Occupy Wall Street.