JAX MACMILLAN: My name is Jax MacMillan, and I studied visual arts at St George Christian School.

[gentle music playing]

My body of work is a triptych of landscape paintings, and it's connected with figures and portrait, and it's meant to all resemble different ways that our masculinity can connect to the Australian landscape.

Beginning my work, I'd painted a massive picture of a deer on the one with the close-up of the man. And it didn't work, and I just painted over it. And then that didn't work. I think I painted a landscape, and that didn't work. And so I did the other 2 and did the central figure with all the hands, and getting that right was pretty difficult.

And so once I had that one right, I kind of built off it and did the portrait over the deer, and that kind of worked. And then I tried to pull them together through the background. And then the last one, I wanted to kind of tie it together and really just show an abstracted form of the landscape itself.

Working with paint, I experimented with drips and a lot of dripping. So I pumped a bunch of water into all my paint because I was using acrylic. And then I just got it to drip down to create this texture of vertical lines. And it was a lot of fun making these paintings. I just got paint everywhere and, you know, it was really messy and just kind of did whatever I felt like and wasn't scared to do something dumb and kind of go with it.

So the plan with the hands was just-- I got sick of one pair of hands, so I just painted more and then, you know, I just kind of went from there, and then-- Well it looked good, so I just kept on adding to it because hands for me are like a really practical, masculine thing where-- like a man, in a very traditional sense, is able to build and, you know, very good at using them, and you know, what their hands can create is very powerful. So that was the kind of symbolism of all the hands in the middle one.

The large portrait was what I painted to kind of show a face and the textures of the skin and the eyes to kind of pull back into the background. So I used a lot of colours that resemble both portraiture and landscape painting in Australian Outback-- so the oranges and the strong, vibrant colours. And so I mixed that with the background to kind of show this blending with the landscape. And I kind of proportioned the face so that the width was all in the middle so it kind of pulls around. And you can see the stretch across the eyes and so that it connected to kind of the horizontal lines in the Outback that you see.

A strong influence for my painting was Aida Tomescu, who does a lot of drips and a lot of motion through the brushstrokes in the way the paint is applied. And so I try to incorporate that into the way I painted.

Now that I have finished my HSC, I'm still painting. I'm still keeping my practice going, and I'm entering competitions and doing what I can to, you know, keep painting.

My advice for people in Year 12 doing the HSC is just be confident and go with it. And if you make mistakes, you can always just fix them. Don't be afraid to, you know, push yourself out of your comfort zone.

[gentle music playing]