I am Alice

In 2013, Jo—my partner, co-conspirator, and the person most likely to calmly announce life-changing decisions over dinner—told me we needed a dog.

Not wanted. Needed.

I heard the word the way you hear someone suggest buying a second fridge or moving countries. Like: Are we really doing this? A dog, to me, meant a slow narrowing of life. The soft closing of doors. Fewer spontaneous trips. More obligations disguised as affection. I pictured muddy paw prints on the floorboards like little signatures of inconvenience. I pictured chewed shoes, wet fur smell, scratched doors, a constant low-level worry.

It wasn’t that I disliked dogs. I just didn’t trust the shape they would make in our lives.

As kids, my brother and I had begged our parents for a puppy. We got a Beagle named Benji—cute as a cartoon, chaotic as a storm. Beagles aren’t dogs so much as they’re noses with legs. The novelty wore off quickly. Benji was returned to the original owners after a few months. That was that. The family story became: We tried. The moral became: Pets are work.

So when Jo started making her case, I resisted the way I resist any big change: I argued for freedom. I defended the clean floor. I appealed to our history. But Jo is persistent in a gentle way, like water wearing down stone. She didn’t push. She just kept describing the kind of life she imagined—one with a dog-shaped warmth moving through it. She spoke about companionship as if it were a missing colour in the palette.

Eventually, I started to see it too: the blank space.

And then, suddenly, there she was.

Alice arrived by plane from Christchurch, as if shipped in from another version of our life. A small fluff ball with the kind of softness that makes you forget your principles. Her body felt like a cloud you could hold. She smelled like fresh beginnings and trouble. She looked at us as if she’d always been ours, as if she’d simply taken a shortcut to get here.

On paper, she was a Labradoodle. In her heart, she was pure Labrador. Which is to say: hunger with a heartbeat.

Alice wanted to eat everything. Tennis balls didn’t survive in our house; they were temporary sculptures. She’d worry one spot until the fuzzy green skin split open like a seam, and then she’d keep going until the inside was exposed—her own private demolition project. Bright rubber bouncy balls? She’d chew them into strange new shapes, and later they’d reappear, transformed again, showing up in her poop like odd little treasures—proof of digestion as art practice.

Crumbs on the floor? Gone. We never needed a vacuum. Alice was the vacuum. Our house developed a new rhythm: human mess, dog erase.

She wasn’t always an angel. Puppies aren’t angels. Puppies are tiny experiments in chaos. She once got her teeth into a prop I’d made for a painting and ate Godzilla’s hand. Follow Me. It’s hard to compete with the primal thrill of chewing a monster’s hand. Poor Godzilla didn’t stand a chance. I remember holding the shredded remains, half annoyed, half impressed. There was something honest about it: Alice didn’t care about the story of the object, only its texture. She treated my careful construction the way the ocean treats sandcastle architecture.

But her greatest love—her true, sacred object—was the Kong.

The Kong became a kind of contract between us. Alice learned the sound of the coffee machine the way people learn the first notes of a favourite song. The morning hiss and gurgle meant treats were on the way. She’d trot over with the Kong in her mouth, eyes bright with expectation, the toy like a ticket she’d already paid for. The deal seemed to be: three treats for her, three single-shot coffees for me. Any more, and my hand starts to wobble, the brush refusing to obey. Even inspiration has limits.

Somewhere along the way, Alice stopped being only a dog and became a presence. She became a moving shape in the house, a warm orbit around our days. She became a witness to the work. And without planning it, she became a subject.

I never intended to paint animals.

But Alice had other ideas.

Sometimes she’d flop down in a patch of light or stretch her body into a perfect curve, and I’d think: That’s a painting. She’d sit with her head on her paws, eyes tracking me as I moved around the studio, and it felt like being watched by a quiet fan. There’s a particular look dogs give you when you’re busy—part patience, part devotion, part: I believe in you, even if I don’t understand what you’re doing.

One day, Jo took a photo of her watching me paint. Her gaze locked on me like she was silently cheering. That moment made it into my mind the way a strong colour does: unavoidable. From there, she kept arriving on canvas, slipping into the work as naturally as breath.

• Fetch (2013)
• Dream Job (2016)
• Obsession (2017)
• Chilling Out (2020)
• What Now? (2022)
• Temptation (2023)
• Daydreaming (2024)

In those paintings, she isn’t an accessory. She’s not there to soften the scene or add charm. She is the scene. A body full of appetite and affection. A creature who doesn’t think about tomorrow, who doesn’t care about plans, who lives entirely in the present tense. That’s what she brought into our lives, too: a constant reminder to return to what’s right in front of you.

Introducing Alice into our lives changed the house, changed the schedule, changed the floor.

But more than that, she changed the atmosphere.

She filled that blank space that Jo had seen from the beginning. She became the missing colour. The puzzle piece. The warm weight beside us. The reminder that life is messy and unpredictable, and that this—this chaos, this devotion, this appetite, this laughable destruction and sudden tenderness—is the point.

What started as just getting a dog turned into a whole new way of living.

And somehow, without ever trying, Alice became part of the work.

54 Obsession

Oil on fine portrait linen: 95 x 125 cm; 37.4 x 49.21 in (Sold)

83 Daydreaming

Oil on fine portrait linen: 95 x 180 cm; 37.4 x 70.86 in (Sold)