The artists

John Lendis

John's collaboration is with scientist Naomi Clear.

I was born the son of a Cinema Manager who watched his dreams fade in later years. My mother was a strong woman who loved us with the suffocating, disappointed love that mothers impose on their children. I grew up in Nottingham, England during the post-war struggle between the ways of parents and the ways of their children. I ran away in the late 1960s – bound to travel the world, I never made it to South America (side-tracked, I somehow landed in this country). And stayed. I crossed the desert to Sydney and opened a fabric design company with a friend. We went broke. I accidentally bought land in Tasmania. It took three weeks to find. I built a house in the mountains. After it burnt down, I built another one. I married, but my mother never knew. I missed the eighties completely, going quietly mad in the thick bush. I painted murals to earn money, and painted for myself every other minute of every day. I planted a forest of wattle trees and was offered "my keep" for life if I painted solely for another man’s business dream. I left the mountains and went to Art School in Hobart. My mother died of cancer and my father months later, from a broken heart.

I returned to Cradle Mountain three years ago, on a winter residency to paint by the light of oil lamps and a generator roaring through the silence of the landscape. I was in love, and the emptiness of the landscape sent me to seek the comfort of human form in my painting. Figures returned, and along with them the strange, elusive hopes and fears of my memory and imagination. Desire and love, loss and sadness – I felt them all reflected in the moon’s halo on the surface of lakes, as footprints in the thick snow. I married again and we gave birth to a child. From here, life is future as much as past – in my imagination I feel the story of my child as much as my own. The landscape is ever-present, a backdrop to the story of my life that continues to unfold.