[Documentation of the work produced for the Master of Fine Arts]

As part of my MFA course, seven portraits in oils will be finished by the end of May, 1990. This choice has been made from my personal experience and visual impression in the past six months, and all paintings will be based on the life of the Greater Hobart Area. These seven portraits, according to their contents, will be automatically inducted into two series, namely Salamanca - Portrait of a City (5 in number) and Bloody Raspberry. The former will describe the lonely mood of islanders who have long been confined by an insular circumstance. As a rule, the Saturday Salamanca is regarded as a chance to bring people into contact. Although multifarious activities such as commercial, artistic, recreational, religious and even political interlock and continue all the morning, when one scrutinizes them it will be found that they are but discrete phenomena, and people are never concerned whatsoever their result will be. Participants of these activities sometimes come merely for a sort of psychic satisfaction - they are actually isolated individuals. In the Salamanca series, I will portray some "nobodies" ~ of the city - buskers and artisans, who are always so engrossed in their humble performance that they become oblivious of their surroundings. Under a sombre sky in Sulivans Cove, their inattentive eyes tell people just how solitary their hearts are. Week after week, and year after year they have become a fossil symbol and an indispensable ingredient of the bazaar. There will be two Portraits in the series Bloody Raspberry, derived from my three-day experience on a fruit farm beyond Mt Wellington. Although aware of being paid harshly for their tedious work, more wanderers, some of them homeless, are coming simply because they can get in the harvest season a free camping - a tinplate hut with a wood-burning fireplace in it. I know some of these raspberry pickers, as I was once one of them, paid not a penny after a long day of labour. Bloody Raspberry - that's the saddest sound from the depth of those squeezed and down-trodden souls. Fundamentally a realistic painter, I like to lay stress on the description of the inner world of my figures, on their reactions to external excitations and on the visual extension of their conflicting thoughts. In these works I will I endeavor to vest my figures with such touching force that the onlookers' sympathy might be roused through a mutual feeling which belongs to all human beings. Humanity factors in these works will possess much greater importance, in comparison with the events depicted. Technically, the seven paintings will be treated in different tones respectively. For each piece in the Salamanca series the identity of tone is the first consideration. Whereas in the Bloody Raspberry, the figures are segregated from their backgrounds, so as to make a strong shock with sharp contrast of colour. All paintings will have an approximate size of some 60" x 60", assuming material is sufficient