The genesis of these dragon paintings was an aerial shot of receding water in Queensland’s Channel Country.  Water drains away and evaporates after the area floods the mostly flat land, leaving unusually shaped shallow pools on lower lying ground and in channels.

I planned to do an aerial landscape but when I drew the shape on the canvas, it seemed so strong that it wanted to take on its own life.

The intent of the work went from being landscape, to an abstract form, then transformed back to a figurative painting of a dragon which, to my delight, persisted when I inverted the canvas. And so a playful series of oil paintings emerged.

The human brain makes connections and meanings where they do not necessarily exist. We are hard wired to do it.  Psychologists even have a term for it, apophenia.