So many moments seem to slip quietly past without asking for our attention.
The light falling across the paddocks just before sunset. Weathered fence posts that have stood strong through countless seasons. Tiny wildflowers growing beside our gravel road.
They’re ordinary moments for me. In a busy world it’s easy to miss these moments without even realising they exist.
For some reason, I notice them and have often wondered why the feeling of certain scenes stay with me long after I’ve left them.
It’s rarely the grand landscapes or dramatic sunsets that have the most impact on me. More often it’s something small. The line of Marri trees disappearing into mist. The old jarrah fence post catching the last light of the day. The shadows on a quiet country road I’ve driven hundreds of times before.
Rather than replicating the actual scene it’s the feeling I get from those moments that I want to capture when I paint.
Perhaps it’s because life has taught me that the ordinary doesn’t stay ordinary for very long. Seasons change, trees fall down, beloved pets grow old and the children grow up and leave home.
The routine moments that once felt never ending quietly become just memories.
Painting has become my way of paying attention before those moments disappear.
I don’t paint to escape my everyday life, I paint because my ordinary ‘everyday’ on the farm is where I find the most beauty and inspiration.
Living here on the farm has shaped that far more than I realised. Life here moves with the seasons rather than the calendar. Rain matters. The colour and length of the grass matters. The arrival of wildflowers, the first cool autumn morning after a scorching summer, the sound of the magpies and kookaburras before sunrise — these small things become part of the rhythm of each year.
The more I pause to look and feel closely, the more extraordinary I realise my ordinary life becomes.
I don’t believe every painting needs to tell a dramatic story. Sometimes it’s enough for a painting to simply make us pause; to act as a reminder to simply slow down and enjoy the extraordinary ordinary life we have.
If someone hangs one of my paintings in their home and, years later, still finds themselves pausing for just a moment as they walk past it, then I feel I’ve done what I hoped to do.
Not because they’ve admired the painting itself, but rather because, for a brief moment they’ve remembered to see the quiet beauty that surrounds them in their ordinary every day.
Perhaps that’s all art really needs to do.