Each time I visit my mum

Each time that I visit my 98-year-old mum who lives in residential care in Perth, I tell her how much I love her painting of three women sitting at a pub bar. Fortunately, she knows that she did the painting but gives me a slightly different story about its origins each time.  Although Mum has painted a little under the supervision of one of the staff in her current abode, it’s been about 20 years since she last lifted a paint brush in her own right. So, I am really grateful that I have a number of her compositions hanging in my home, as do others in the family.

 A tough, non-nonsense woman, Mum was introduced to art when she attended teachers’ college. That was after completing her matriculation at night school in her 40s, and after she had mothered six children. 

Ironically, Mum could not draw for nuts. However, she was fortunate in being taught abstract oil and acrylic painting by one of Western Australia’s most respected artists, Elizabeth (Liz) Ford. Throughout her time at Churchlands Teachers College, and then for many years afterwards, Mum would travel with Liz Ford to remote places in northwest Western Australia on painting excursions, where she produced bold, beautifully textured abstract compositions that capture the rugged colours and contours of my home state.

She once told me that she liked to paint in the style of another extraordinary Australian artist, Fred Williams.  

While Mum is not famous and sold her paintings to  a small number of people, I am thrilled that her work hangs on the walls of homes of family and friends scattered throughout Australia.