Curator Statement

This painting is all about love and I guess, in a sense, has become quite a well-known picture. When I was a young boy, 14, I first saw the little Cabin in the corner of Chinamans Beach and I always wanted to be there and I always hoped one day that I could have a studio there or, I guess at that stage I didn’t know I’d become an artist, but I always felt a strong affinity. And this painting and a number of pictures done at this time is essentially about the great joy of being in that studio for the first time and looking at all of the things that are going on: about the pattern of the clouds, about the pattern of the boats, about the frangipani, about the paint, about the palette, if you look in the bottom of the painting on the yellow table, which I in fact still paint on, you’ll find all kinds of little clues and, I hope, paintings within paintings. You’ll find a cowry shell on the left hand side, you’ll see a couple of postcards, one that’s got some fish, one that’s got a little postcard from Tahiti where we’ve just come back from. The flowers from the garden are in a vase on the right hand side, the arrangement of the paint, the arrangement of the Morning Glories, the arrangement of the paint on the palette all, I hope, give the viewer some kind of joy and some kind of pleasure about the visual things that inspire artists. And, in a sense, I wanted to call it Sunday in the sense that it should be a kind of sweet painting, it should be almost a painting that you can eat: in some ways it’s about Sunday the day, Sunday a day of pleasure and of rest and joy and in a sense a painting that you could almost eat. I’ve often come back to this particular subject and I guess for as long as I’m in the Cabin I will. It’s just simply the joy of living beside Sydney Harbour.