Some works arrive fully formed. Others take years to find their shape. Storm Man was somewhere in between — a piece I knew I needed to make long before I understood exactly what it was saying.
Where It Started
The Capricorn Coast gets serious storms. Not the polite kind that pass through quickly — the kind that build for days on the horizon, that you can smell coming before you can see them. There's a particular quality to the light just before a big storm hits: everything goes very still, very green, and the air feels charged with something that's hard to describe but impossible to ignore.
I'd been watching one of those storms build over the Keppel Islands when the image came to me: a figure standing in it. Not sheltering from it. Standing in it. Present. Unafraid. Part of it.
The Making
Storm Man is an etching, worked on a zinc plate over several weeks. The process of etching suits this kind of subject — the acid bites into the metal slowly, unpredictably, and the marks it leaves have a quality that you can't replicate with a brush or a pen. There's a rawness to it that felt right for a piece about weather and exposure.
I worked the plate through multiple acid baths, building up layers of tone. The sky in the final print has a depth that took a long time to achieve — that sense of weight and movement that a real storm sky has.
What It Means
Storm Man is about resilience, but not the triumphant kind. It's about the quieter resilience of simply being present in difficult conditions. Of not turning away. The figure isn't conquering the storm — he's in relationship with it.
I think that's something a lot of people recognise. We all have our storms. The question is whether we face them or flee them.
The response to this piece has been extraordinary — it's one of the works I'm asked about most, and the stories people share about why it resonates with them are humbling. Art does that: it becomes a mirror.
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