I was actively discouraged from taking art in high school. I think this was because I was quite good at academic subjects and vocational guidance tests came back showing I had no artistic aptitude. I was a bit miffed, but I did enjoy the other subjects, and I wasn't really getting a lot out of art the way it was being taught.

I came to Glenmorgan in 1968 and the Glenmorgan Art Group started in about 1969 with five or six founding members. I think we must have heard through the Meandarra Arts Council that funding was available and for groups joining Mervyn's Eastaus Flying Arts School, which at that stage had been going for at least a year. I remember going over as a group to Surat to listen to someone from what is now the equivalent of Arts Queensland who speaking about regular seminars and a structured course. Initially I wasn't terribly keen. I thought the only way I was going to get anywhere was by doing my own thing. I was very wrong. The others members, thank goodness, were keen and we put our names down. We had our first Flying Arts seminars in and around Dorothy and Dave Gordon's home at Myall Park.

I suppose what appealed to me most was Mervyn's analysis of how a painting was constructed - you don't just look and blob. Even the most abstract art has form and composition and an underlying colour scheme which you have to plan. I remember him saying clearly that you don't just make a mark haphazardly, every mark is there because you want it to be there. There was something in the teaching process that really opened a door for me. I could then understand what I'd been brought up to think was ‘weird' art. For the generation of teachers, my parents and other people who influenced me, Impressionism was acceptable, but they couldn't cope with Sidney Nolan and the brilliant art that was happening at the time. I suppose I didn't know much about it, or try to understand it.

I remember going around the Tate Gallery in London in the 60s and seeing the most contemporary of what was contemporary at the time. One work was a bunch of grapes in neon fluorescent tubing and I really couldn't see the point of this. To me it was just like taking an advertising hoarding down and hanging it in the gallery. Five years later with Mervyn at Myall Park, looking at the incandescent colours of some of the native flowers I thought about that fluorescent tubing. Suddenly it all made sense, and everything Mervyn has said fell into place. In art, there is no ‘how-to' and you're only limited by what you can dream up.

At one stage in the 80s I was painting prolifically, doing spotty, stripy landscapes which became a bit of a recipe for me in a couple of exhibitions I had. I was expressing my landscape and the places I visited and loved, and it was all very easy, but I came to a full stop. I felt I had overdosed on this one theme, and I was dissatisfied. I wasn't saying what I wanted to say in my paintings. I went through a period of self-analysis and explored mythology, the runes, the I Ching, and my own psychic nature. At this stage, I ignored place and the very significant influence it has always had on me. I was casting around, feeling rather lost. That was the time I went back to Flying Arts. Bev Budgen, Wendy Allen, Jenny McDuff, Colin Reaney, Zanette Kahler, Shelagh Morgan and Kim Mahood were among the tutors, and I enjoyed their seminars immensely.

Kim's way of working had a great impact on me. She had just made a trip back to her childhood home, which was in the harsh environment of the Tanami Desert. There, they were really, really isolated. The way she approached her artwork with rubbings and mark making and the types of backgrounds she used, such as hessian and ground sheets struck a definite chord. I immediately related to Kim's experience, and working with her seemed to clarify and validate my own.

Place is still the most important theme in my work, though it is not always my place. I did a lot of ‘home' paintings in the drought of the early 90s, an enormously significant event in our lives that needed recording.