Introduce yourself.
I’m a figurative painter (although I often paint interiors that are absent of human figures) who likes a bit of narrative. I flirt with realism, surrealism, the absurd and the sublime in small scale. I would move into whatever sharehouse in heaven is tenanted by Felix Valloton, Edward Hopper and Henri Rousseau.
When did you first fall in love with art?
When I was in year 12, I moved into an old caravan my parents had put beside the shed, away from them and my five siblings. It was like having a studio. I stretched my own canvas out of the flour sacks I got from my aunt’s bakery and started painting in oils in the manner of the Impressionists, an influence from my high school art teacher. I slept with my jars of industrial turps left open and woke up in the morning tasting it in my spit. It really got into my blood then.
How long have you been practicing as an artist?
I studied fine art at Curtin University, Perth in the mid-90s, majoring in printmaking. I tell people that I did it to improve my drawing but really the printmakers were the coolest – they smoked prodigiously and drove vintage cars. But as someone with a refugee background from a country town in WA, I didn’t really know what I needed to do to make a career as an artist after I graduated and didn’t know who or how to ask for help. I didn’t know what an opportunity looked like and what to do with it. After I moved to Melbourne in 2002, I worked in office jobs that lead me into communications and marketing roles. Then I studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT and for a time I wrote and worked in independent publishing. This combined work experience gave me a better sense of what I needed to give painting a real crack, which I’ve been doing fulltime since last November.
What is your work about?
I explore themes about kitsch, the environment, reading, cultural identity and the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia. Subjects include birds, insects, plants and flowers, and everyday cultural objects and icons. There is a lot of nostalgia in my interiors at the moment. Sometimes I borrow from the literary world. My inspiration comes from being a middleaged Viet-Australian man living in regional Victoria with a young family who no longer wants to be cynical. Also, author Lucy Treloar, who has kindly given me free reign of her photographs of flowers. I paint in oils because it’s tactile – I like to scratch into it, swab it, rub it, soak it up in newspaper. And I love turps, I could suck it through a dishcloth.
What have you been working on recently?
I have a group show in September at Boom Gallery here in Geelong – it’s an exhibition of new artists to the gallery.
If you could own one artwork what would it be?
Goya’s The Naked Maja, for her thighs, which you can’t really appreciate unless you see them in real life.