"This recent group of paintings continues my exploration of themes and motifs familiar to me. I find inspiration in my daily surrounds, and use this as a leaping off point for creating my own world. My paintings are constructions, part imaginary but always with a foot in reality as perceived through the senses.

These works are mainly about beauty, and the sometimes peculiar places it can be found. Beauty is hard to pin down, but in visual terms a few graspable components that come to mind are shape, effects of light, form and colour. Some of the more vague aspects can be described with words like mystery, mood and feeling. There are many others, but breaking up the overall effect of a painting into bits and pieces is like trying to see the individual trees and the forest at the same time. You can't really get the whole thing looking at the bits.

The aesthetic of the painting is crucial in my view, but I'm also intrigued by narrative, and the way we are hard wired for it, living by the stories we tell ourselves.

Representational or figurative art by its nature can trigger a narrative in the viewer, and it seems this feeling can be subtle, or solid, depending on what the artist chooses to do in the painting."
 

Nick Dridan is a painter who works mainly in oil and watercolour. His paintings are inspired by the landscape that surrounds him; a farm in the Pyrenees Ranges in Central Victoria. Having grown up there, both memory and direct observation have a role to play in his working method.

Nick Dridan has been a finalist in several prizes including the A.M.E Bale Travelling Prize and the Len Fox Painting Prize.