After leaving Sydney some time ago, I have passionately observed and experienced Life in the tropics. Drawing since 3years of age, my art had been influenced by my Father, a white Russian and himself a sketcher, who had immigrated to Australia by ship from Shanghai to Sydney in 1949..

Recently boats and birds appear within my artwork, in contrast, stylized not only on freedom and innocence but on the endangered, conserved, dispossessed or displaced, symbolically representing humanity and the animal and insect world. Birds cross borders with ease, migration and immigration. The idea of the bird who sails became compelling as, like the immigrant, it eventually finds itself in a bewildering city of foreign customs and peculiar animals. Another influence is artist Shaun Tan. His writings such as ‘’The Arrival ‘ .. a migrant story is told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval, curious indecipherable languages and hope.

While placement of disconnected things in my work represent the grief I feel about my lost heritage, simultaneously I aim to suggest the spirit present within me infusing space with a positivity felt here in North Queensland and provocatively seek an inner more personal hope for peace much sought after globally.

Often when something challenges our comfortable reality – a good story begins…our fragilities and strengths, sadness or anger, disturbance and celebration, reminding us we are yet mortal. I openly provoke concern for our beautiful planet’s sustainability.

I approach the making of images seriously and hope that they will reveal something universally true about the human and animal condition .. using form, space, light, colour and movement to express an evocative work and personal searching.

I find Life to be stimulating, seductive and full of subtlety and nuance. Because of this intense and continual observation I feel that I am able to make a poetic, sensitive and intimate statement about each subject.

I have tried to evoke a sense of time when everything is possible and the discoveries of fear and death are tempered by joy and innocence whilst evoking the passing of time and memory inviting the viewer to interact more closely, perhaps to meditate on reflection and action. I have alluded to the poetic rather than the historic relationship between past and future changes.

I strive to make sense of and to finding unexpected pleasures in this global existence, hopefully enriching the lives of others.