Over the last five years I've done a lot of painting out of doors, so I had the idea of doing a self portrait doing just that. Most of the painting was done in my backyard at Ballarat but the distant background was painted in another location on the outskirts of Ballarat. The aim was to catch the condition of being outside in the open air rather than portraying an artist painting a specific location.
When I first started studying art seriously in my 20s, I thought art was a mater of exactitude, but it's really about understanding that one's imagination can take precedence over the facts.
Just after I took the top two backyard shots, the wind blew everything over, so I had to scrape off the paint, which contained strands of grassI, and redo everything I had done that day. Luckily there wasn't a substantial area to repaint.
En Plein Air, 2016, oil on canvas, 71.25 x 51 cm
