A Photographer Who Paints
Why I spent years looking for a style when the work already knew who I was.
For years I believed every successful artist needed a recognisable style.
It seemed obvious. If someone walked into a gallery and saw one of your images on the wall, they should immediately know it was yours. Your work needed a visual identity, a signature, something unmistakably you.
I spent years looking for it.
A few months ago I visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition.
What struck me wasn't any single painting. It was the freedom of the work itself.
Here was an artist who refused to remain in one visual language. Figurative paintings sat comfortably alongside abstraction. There wasn't one recognisable Richter style, but a lifetime of curiosity expressed through different visual languages.
I left with a quiet but important thought.
Perhaps artistic identity isn't something that comes before the work.
Perhaps it is something that only becomes visible afterwards.
Then, more recently, came another moment of recognition.
Like many people, I found myself reflecting on the extraordinary life of David Hockney. He is rightly celebrated as one of Britain's great painters, yet painting was never the whole story. Photography wasn't separate from his painting. It was simply another way he explored the world.
For some reason, that mattered to me.
It wasn't that either artist was giving me permission.
What changed was that I finally gave myself permission.
I didn't have to decide whether I was a photographer or a painter.
I could simply be an artist who happens to work with both.
Two very different works by Gerhard Richter, illustrating the breadth of his artistic practice.
David Hockney's practice embraced both photography and painting as parallel ways of seeing.
Photography has always appealed to me because of its immediacy.
I enjoy moving through the world, discovering rather than constructing. Even when I'm working in the studio with conceptual still life, the process isn't rigid. I move objects. I move lights. I change direction. If something isn't working, I don't force it. I explore until the photograph begins to reveal itself.
Perhaps that's the advertising art director in me. Years spent directing photographers taught me how images are built, but they also taught me that the best solutions often arrive unexpectedly.
Ironically, the work that brought me the most recognition was often the most straightforward.
My portrait of Charlotte was selected for the Australian National Portrait Prize in 2010. And that same year, a documentary photograph of a Spider-Man balloon shaper was displayed as part of the Moran Prize exhibition at the National Library of Australia.
Those were wonderful moments, and I'm enormously grateful for them.
Yet neither photograph fully explained what interested me most.
Running alongside those images was another body of work entirely.
Conceptual work.
The recognition came from one direction. My curiosity kept pulling me somewhere else.
Charlotte Dark - 2010 Finalist NPPP Australia
Spidey - 2010 Finalist Moran Photography Prize Australia
Knife and Fork - 2015 Experiment in trompe l'oeil
Scissors - 2008
Train of Sleep Series - 2009 Winner Best New Commercial talent ASWPP edge photo awards - The Hogan Gallery, Victoria / 2010 IPA Awards honorary mention
Up and Down - 2007
Painting followed a remarkably similar path.
The early paintings were rooted in observation and reality - Australian houses, flowers on a windowsill, a dress draped over the back of a chair.
But I wanted something else to exist within the picture. Not because I disliked what I was making, but because I felt there should be more. I even painted a strange, realistic portrayal of a childhood memory - the time my sister fed me grass from a bowl while I pretended to be a cat. (I was five.)
Flowers on windowsill, Kirribilli, Australia - 1996
When I was a cat and you fed me grass - 2017
That eventually led me to experimenting with what I jokingly called "paintography" - combining photography and painted surface and shadow in a way that blurred the distinction between the two.
More recently it has led me towards abstraction: painting walls with palette knives and builders' trowels, reducing architecture to colour and texture.
Tea for One - 2018
Walls series - 2025
So, for years I worried that I hadn't found my style.
I was confused. There was no single recognisable thread - or so I thought. But something quietly persisted underneath.
When I look across decades of work now - whether photography or painting - I don't see disconnected thinking.
There has always been a conceptual thread running through the work.
An interest in ideas rather than simply appearances.
The medium changes.
The concept remains.
Perhaps that is why searching for a style became such a distraction.
I spent years believing there was a perfect artistic identity waiting to be discovered.
There wasn't.
It was already there.
I simply hadn't recognised it.
Had I spent less time searching and more time making, I might have seen it much sooner.
Procrastination has always been a far greater enemy than uncertainty.
Doing the work reveals more than thinking about the work ever could.
The real question isn't whether I'm a photographer or a painter.
It's whether the work remains true to me.
The only thing I can really do is keep working, keep exploring and keep following that quiet conceptual thread that has been present all along.
Looking back, I wasn't changing direction.
I needed to recognise the direction I had already been travelling.
Ideas.
I am an idea artist.
