Acrylics on canvas. 165cmx116cm

Derek Maitland began painting five years ago after returning to Australia from a 35-year global odyssey as a journalist, author, magazine publisher and video producer.

In his years overseas he lived and worked in Hong Kong and SE Asia, UK and Europe, Beirut and the Middle East and in Canada.

Now based in Petersham, Sydney, he and his wife, Jan, are working together as multimedia artists, producing photo-based digital art to support a web forum, The Earthlight Channel, which they’re developing to present philosophy and a range of multimedia and multicultural features and entertainment.

Derek Maitland is a self-developed abstract artist whose sudden impulse, five years ago, to put paint to canvas needs some explaining. As he tells it: “My eldest son is an abstract painter, musician and art teacher in Oxford, UK, but there’s very little in my own upbringing and persona that would have earmarked me, even so late in life, for art.