I’d be trying to change all the time in a way, I’d be attempting to – not to repeat, not to go back – but to extract something from what I’d done and to build on it in a way, and I dare say my painting on the whole doesn’t give the impression perhaps of being built on in the same way as someone who’s a very consistent painter and probably more even; I mean, I consider myself an extremely uneven painter, and I think to extract something fresh each time out of a bout which you do is the ideal thing, but I find it difficult, and I hope that I’m doing it, but I’d prefer to come out with something fresh and marvellous every time. But, I mean, you don’t ever come out with anything fresh or marvellous, it always seems ghastly when it goes up on the wall, and maybe it is.
I hope it’s becoming less taped, or typed. Not meant to be a pun, but anyway, I think that’s what I’d prefer to be happening, that it’s becoming just as much mine, if I can make it that way, but much less typed in the sense that it would be, well, ‘that’s Australian’, or ‘that comes from Melbourne, that comes from Ballarat, that’s where …’. I’d like it to be much more a universal sort of thing. I don’t mean necessarily the painting to look as if it could be done anywhere, but just that it would be much more like good painting rather than like something that comes from somewhere.
