When I think about my favourite artists, I don’t immediately picture a museum wall or a famous exhibition. I think of the painting that hangs in our home — one that has moved with us from house to house, always finding pride of place.
It’s by John Coburn, the Australian abstract painter whose work captures the grandeur of our land in shapes that feel both organic and sacred. Coburn once said his art was “flat-patterned, using brilliant colour combinations based on natural or organic images.” Yet behind that simplicity is a spiritual charge, as if the earth itself were whispering its own prayer.
I still remember the day we stumbled upon the painting — early in our marriage, in a small regional gallery a few hours drive north of Sydney. We had no money to speak of, but when we saw it, something in us both said yes. I turned to my wife and said, “If you like, put a deposit on it and we can pay it off over time.”
And so we did.
Over the years, that painting has travelled with us through each chapter of life. Wherever we’ve lived, it’s hung in a prominent place, radiating warmth and order, like a window to another kind of light.
Coburn had a gift for taking the vastness of Australia — the blinding sun, the deep reds and ochres, the brilliant blues — and distilling them into shapes that somehow made sense of chaos. His Curtain of the Sun and Curtain of the Moon were commissioned to hang in the Sydney Opera House (see image above), while others adorn the Kennedy Center and even the Vatican. Yet for me, his genius lies not in prestige, but in the way his work quietly holds its space.
That’s what the best artists do: they stay with you. They give you a vocabulary for wonder. They make home feel larger than its walls.
Every time I walk past our Coburn, I’m reminded that beauty, like faith, isn’t loud or showy — it’s steadfast. It doesn’t demand attention; it invites it. And when you give it that attention, it gives you back something infinite.
The Afterword 
Leave a comment