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" was a commissioned series about a nasty fall that brought mortality too close to this man. One of this sequence was in the "Who's Looking at You?" show in Melbourne.  "Paul, Kintsugi Man" was done on his request, not many months before Paul died.  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 in the Australian Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.  "Man of Peace" shows two images of the man who started the annual Sydney Peace Prize, with his very active face and hands, intense in conversation and quiet in contemplation.  "Sid's Mother" was painted solely on the basis of a poem, and - happily - Sid, the poet, loved it.