This painting was missing, presumed lost, for a couple of years. In the months following last year’s move, I discovered it in a storage box we had believed to contain packaging materials. (It did, but the individual components of the painting were safely packed underneath).
The work was a finalist in the Geelong Painting Prize in 2002 and toured in the curated group show, ‘The enchanted forest - new gothic storytellers,’ in 2008-2009.
I even wrote a fairy tale based on it. An early draft of the story was published in my first blog post. You can read it HERE. The final version of the tale was subsequently included in my book, There was once... the collected fairy tales (2009).
I’d more or less resigned myself to never seeing the painting again, so much so, that I still find it hard to believe it’s back in my possession.
Pictured top: Swarm, 2002, acrylic on 32 oval canvases, paired. Large: 25 x 20 cm each; small: 15 x 20 cm each. Overall dimensions approx. 172 x 194 cm.
