PORTRAITS:  People have tremendous strength, and yet everyone is vulnerable and ultimately mortal.  Faces tell so much, and we train all our lives to read them, whether we know it or not.  Some of my best work has come from requests for portraits that I first thought impossible.  I've been told that I "capture the essence of a person's soul in my portraits," a compliment that I try to live up to.  "After the Fall" are 5 out of a commissioned series of 9.  The fall in this case was a nasty one that brought mortality too close to this man, as can be seen in this sequence.  "After the Fall #2 was chosen to be part of the annual competitive show, "Who's Looking at You?" in Cambridge Studio Gallery in Melbourne.  "Paul, Kintsugi Man" was done on his request, not many months before Paul died.  Kintsugi is a Japanese art form in which valued but broken ceramics are repaired with gold - and become yet more valuable.  Paul had many scars, some from rough bike riding, some from years of fighting a tough cancer.  He saw kintsugi as a metaphor for himself, and asked me to paint him with his scars in gold.  This painting was a semi-finalist (one of 132 out of over 1000 entries) in the Australian Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, in 2018.  "Man of Peace" shows two overlapping images of the man who started the annual Sydney Peace Prize.  The two images of him show his very active face and hands, intense in conversation and quiet in contemplation.  There are two versions of this work, one owned by the subject and one in the collection of the artist.  "Sid's Mother" was painted solely on the basis of a poem, and - happily - Sid, the poet, loved it.  "Ted's Friend" and "Sunshine" are older works, both watercolours.