Paddock at Longford

In late December 2019, my wife, Danielle, was diagnosed with breast cancer. In September 2020 we celebrated our twenty-year wedding anniversary.

My primary role in 2020 was to hold our family together during the often brutal cancer journey. Additionally, to our cancer narrative we have, like the rest of the community managed the COVID–19 pandemic. COVID with my wife having cancer and a severely compromised immune system, has added an extreme concern on Danielle’s health and our family life.

“Paddock at Longford” depicts the image from our car window as I drove Danielle to medical appointments and uses the landscape genre as a metaphor to depict the cancer journey as emotionally experienced by the carer; the brutality, the worry, anguish and challenging heartbreak.

Painted mostly at night, alone and in a silent studio space, the canvas represents an inner more transient time. Raw and at times with a crude connectivity between the hand and heartbreak, the artwork represents a struggle to maintain calm and positive, whilst surrounded by a forbidding grey darkness.