My art takes me to deserts, for in deserts I can think. The overwhelming subtleties of tone, colour, form, beauty, brutality, the silence is noise, shadows haunted, earth stained, unbearable heat or penetrating cold, but delicious isolation and stillness. I’m a crude contemporary explorer searching the physical landscape to understand the landscape of the mind. Images of isolation and alienation. Other landscapes, in other countries, bring their own palette and sensibility, different, it’s the Australian Deserts that makes me calm with possibilities. I am someone who feels unconnected to any place. This is not my land, I’m a stranger, I observe, never connected by being country, I’m not of this land , I’m only an observer. I paint. 

– David Middlebrook