Every now and then, a painting finds its person before you’ve really had a chance to introduce it to the world. Guidearne was one of those paintings.
Back in June, while visiting St Helens for the Art Show, a lovely collector saw Guidearne sitting on my easel in the studio. She lives on Bruny Island and connected with the painting almost immediately. The wild coast, the wind and the woman with her long dark hair streaming behind her felt wonderfully familiar — she could see a little of herself and her island home in the painting.
And just like that, Guidearne had found where she belonged.
A cloak made from stories
One of my favourite parts of creating Guidearne was her enormous patchwork cloak.
Rather than simply painting the pattern, I built the cloak from individual pieces of collage, combining florals, handwritten words, old-fashioned patterns, tiny images and decorative papers. Each little piece becomes part of something larger — almost like scraps of memories gathered over a lifetime and stitched together.
I love the idea that we all carry these fragments with us: people we’ve loved, places we’ve lived, things we’ve lost, moments we remember and experiences that have shaped who we’ve become.
Up close, there are all sorts of tiny details to discover. From a distance they merge into one sweeping cloak, caught by the wind and wrapped around the figure.
Wild, windswept and a little bit Tasmanian
There’s something about our Tasmanian coastline that I return to again and again in my paintings. It can be beautiful and peaceful one moment and wonderfully wild the next.
In Guidearne, I wanted to capture that feeling of standing at the edge of the sea with the wind whipping around you — the landscape moving, your hair flying and your clothes taking on a life of their own.
Perhaps that’s why I love the story of where this painting ended up so much.
I painted a windswept woman wrapped in her stories beside the sea in St Helens, and she found her home with a windswept, dark-haired woman beside the sea on Bruny Island.
Sometimes a painting seems to know exactly where it belongs. ❤️