Mike Worrall's skill is to stand at the sensory threshold, that hypothetical border between sumptuous and sinister. His large tableau paintings are maze-like journeys into surreal landscapes and, if the wrong path is taken, may lead us to a very dark place. He invites us to step beyond the threshold into the hinterland of the human soul. Each vignette, each composition, is in itself a perfect still from an unfinished film, perhaps left as a talisman by an obscure film-maker. As if gleaned from a lost archive, the image may just be a fragment. Each painting celebrates a cultural succession borne of the Renaissance, and the twentieth century’s champions of surrealist understatement; Magritte, Delvaux, Ernst, and a touch of Velasquez.

Worrall engages the audience with a mastery of colour, tone, composition and perspective.  His is the other side of the looking glass, between the normal and the imagined, a pantomime to enjoy, via the artist's fertile imagination. Informed by his work in film, Worrall explores hyper-real depictions of the mysterious and fantastical.  As in a dream, the quiet façade and the beauty of the large scale oil paintings masks the intriguing content and enormous energy underpinning the works. Based on the Central Coast of NSW, Australia, Mike has been a practicing artist since the early 1960s and exhibits both locally and internationally.