A Call for Entrepreneurial Fire in the Australian Artist Mindset
Australian artists are taught to be grateful. Grateful for a group show, grateful for exposure, grateful for the chance to enter a prize, grateful for the thinnest slice of institutional approval. Gratefulness has become a kind of soft discipline, something that keeps artists quiet and compliant while the gallery system creaks under the weight of its own limitations. In a country that prides itself on invention and grit, the art world remains strangely timid.
How Adulthood Kills Creativity (and How to Get It Back)
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, something happens to the imagination. We stop playing. We start managing.
Bills, routines, work deadlines, parenting… life becomes a list. The adult brain becomes a well-trained manager: efficient, organised, and practical. But somewhere along the way, it forgets how to wander, to take risks, to play, to experiment, to try new things, to make strange connections. These are the very things that creativity depends on.
The System is the Freedom: Why Every Artist Needs a Creative Process
There is a popular myth that creativity is chaos. That it arrives in flashes of inspiration, unpredictable and wild. But anyone who has spent serious time in the studio knows that real creativity lives in structure. It is not chaos at all. It is a system that the artist builds, refines, and returns to until it begins to generate its own rhythm.
Every great artist has, in their own way, invented a methodical system. A personal architecture through which creativity flows.
Stop Waiting to Be Picked: Australia’s Art Prize Obsession and the Death of Creative Independence
Australia has a problem; an addiction, really. An addiction to art prizes. Every year, artists line up for judgment like contestants in a talent show, submitting their work to the same narrow gatekeepers, hoping this time they’ll be picked. The Archibald, the Wynne, the Ramsay - glittering symbols of validation that promise prestige but often deliver something else entirely: dependency.
It’s pick me culture dressed up as cultural celebration. A system that whispers to artists: you’ll matter when someone important says you do. And that message seeps deep. It erodes confidence, reshapes ambition, and teaches a dangerous lesson - that art is only legitimate if it’s sanctioned.
True Creativity: Why Risk, Failure, and Play Matter More Than Talent
True creativity isn’t a lightning bolt of inspiration - it’s a slow-burning fire built from curiosity, courage, and persistence. It’s the art of trying, failing, and trying again until something unexpected takes shape. In an age that rewards perfection and predictability, creativity remains one of the few places where risk is still sacred.
Creativity begins where certainty ends. It’s not a formula or a gift. It’s a way of engaging with the world that invites surprise. The most powerful ideas rarely arrive fully formed; they reveal themselves through play, persistence, and a kind of joyful risk-taking.
Art Practice as Salvation of the Soul in Modern Life
In an age of relentless motion, where screens glow and attention flickers - the simple act of making art feels almost radical. To pick up a brush, to draw a line, to simply sit still long enough for colour and thought to converge - this is resistance. It’s a quiet revolt of the soul against a culture of acceleration and alienation.
Art has always been a mirror, but in modern life, it’s also a sanctuary. The studio becomes a place where the noise recedes. Where the self, scattered across notifications and expectations, gathers again. The process of making is not only about producing something beautiful - it’s about recovering something human.
The Anti-Statement: Making Art That Doesn’t Explain Itself
In every exhibition, grant application, or artist talk, we are asked to explain ourselves. To define. To interpret. To articulate intention.
As if the artwork itself isn’t enough. As if silence isn’t an answer.
This is the age of the artist statement, and while reflection can be useful, there’s an implicit demand in contemporary art culture:
“Tell us what it means or we won’t know how to look at it.”
But what if the best art doesn’t want to be explained? What if its power is precisely in what it withholds?
In Defence of Colour: A Call for a Colour Renaissance in Art and Design
Walk through most new neighbourhoods, office lobbies, or Instagram interiors today and you’ll see a recurring aesthetic: neutrals. White walls. Black tapware. Grey furniture. Charcoal cladding. Cream linen. If colour appears at all, it’s apologetically; a sage green throw, a dusty pink accent wall, a beige ceramic vase.
This is the world we’ve built: calm, tasteful, restrained, and deeply afraid of colour.
An Homage to Keith Haring: The Radical Joy of Lines That Moved
There are artists whose work you remember, and artists whose work you feel.
Keith Haring was both, but he was also something more. He was a movement. A rhythm. A visual pulse in a city that never stopped moving.
Where Is the Art? Artefact vs. Experience in Contemporary Practice
Is art the object; the canvas, the wall, the painted form? Or is it the moment something stirs within the viewer? Is it the thing, or the encounter with the thing?
The Art of Play: Why Playfulness is Essential to the Creative Process
We often associate the word play with childhood; with freedom, spontaneity, and imagination unbound by consequence. But in the studio, on the wall, or in the sketchbook, play is far more than child’s work. It is a serious methodology.
Beyond the Domestic: How Women Artists Are Rewriting the Narrative of Subject Matter
For centuries, women were permitted to paint; provided they confined their vision to interiors. The domestic realm, soft and cyclical, was considered an appropriate scale for female expression. Children at play, vases of cut flowers, sunlit rooms. These were the acceptable subjects for the feminine gaze, safe within the boundaries of private life.
Beyond the Label: Why Calling Someone a "Female Artist" Can Be a Disservice
In a well-meaning attempt to uplift women in the arts, the term “female artist” is often used to signal inclusion, empowerment, or progress. But despite good intentions, this label can quietly reinforce the very inequality it seeks to dismantle.
The Geometry of Thought: How Logic and Mathematics Shape Abstraction in Visual Art
There is a certain beauty that emerges when human perception aligns itself with order. Not the dull rigidity of imposed systems, but the quiet elegance of internal rhythm. This is the beauty we encounter in the mathematics of art. Not as calculation, but as a philosophy of form.
Creativity in Conversation: Why Collaboration Enhances Public Art
The romantic image of the lone artist, toiling away in isolation, chasing inspiration in solitude, is a compelling myth. But in the realm of public art, creativity rarely works that way.
Public art is not created in a vacuum. It’s born in dialogue with place, people, planners, architects, fabricators, and sometimes, even passersby. In this context, collaboration isn’t a compromise, it’s a catalyst.
The Street as a Gallery: How Public Art Brings Art to the People
Art is often thought of as something that lives behind glass; framed, guarded, and hung on white walls. For many, entering a gallery can feel like crossing an invisible threshold of class, education, or privilege. The art may be powerful, but the context can be alienating.
That’s why public art matters.
What Is a Canvas? A Philosophical Reflection on Surfaces, Space, and the Act of Art
We often think of a canvas as something stretched, primed, and waiting. A pristine rectangle on an easel or wall, patiently anticipating the mark of the artist. But this definition is both too narrow and too passive.
A canvas is not a surface, it is an invitation. And that invitation can exist anywhere.
Beyond the Portrait Wall: Why Public Art Needs a Style Revolution
Walk through almost any city today and you’ll likely encounter a mural; often large, figurative, and skilfully rendered. There’s no denying the technical prowess behind many of these works. They’re celebrated, photogenic, and accessible. But as an artist deeply engaged in the evolution of visual language, I believe we’ve reached a plateau.
Risk, Chance, and the Abstract Eye: Embracing the Unknown in Composition
At first glance, abstraction can appear precise; a studied interplay of form, colour, and space. But beneath the surface of many abstract works lies a kind of structured uncertainty: a choreography between control and chaos, intention and improvisation. For me, chance and risk are not accidents in the creative process. They are methods.
Why Overly Gentrified Cities Lack Vitality and What We Can Learn from New York
Great cities aren’t built solely by architects or planners; they’re forged in the friction between people, place, and culture. When cities become too planned, too polished, or too gentrified, they often lose the very thing that makes them vibrant: spontaneity.