Artworks by Adam Bogusz

I paint Australian landscapes, though they are really invented ones. They usually begin by accident. I pour a loose, accidental ground, half accident and half intention, made somewhere in the middle where the paint and I meet, then cut into the sky and follow what is there, working fearlessly through to the smallest detail. That fearlessness is the whole thing for me.

I call this world The Middle Country, after Alan Watts and his idea that we always exist in the middle of things, something bigger and something smaller than us at every turn. The cockatoos and the small figures who fill these paintings, cycling, fishing, sitting at the top of a hill, are really one thing: my family, painted over and over. Underneath it all I am circling the mystery of being alive without ever quite explaining it.

Watts and Terence McKenna shaped how I see, and I have always loved artists who bent the rules, Bowie, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Prince. I work in acrylic on board. I did not learn creativity so much as remember it, and painting still feels like play rather than work.