Speaking of stones and trees, the bones of things Beneath the wheel of stars Dark outside and cold and no wind

The texture of life and our experience of it is always made by one thing folding into others, in turn informing the texture of our reading of anything. Accordingly, I made the easy assumption that Max’s landscapes refer to his immediate environment, the hinterland of Queensland's Sunshine Coast. In fact — his sources come from far and wide — but I believe that his immediate environment infiltrates these paintings of other places. His environment, not to mention the environment, is too much on his mind not to insert itself somewhere. Because Max is a science fiction reader and I happen to love Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I imagine the landscapes having a certain ‘Area-X’ quality — something extraterrestrial in the terrestrial. My pleasure in looking at them, whilst they are beautiful, is in the sense of ill-ease, or uncanniness that’s also there and that echoes the folding of one thing into another, morphing and mutating sones and entities. To me, Max’s use of line and colour lends itself to this, though others will see and feel something else entirely. I was initially rejected from art school but it might have been good for me. Later, when I finally got there, I loved it! Maybe that extra time outside helped me recognise a process of de-institutionalising oneself that’s necessary for some, to make good work, or, to go on making work at all. The painters amongst my cohort were all tied up in knots — primarily about painting being dead — and desperately trying to figure out how to enter the expanded field at any cost, crippled by the weight of needing to reinvent the wheel all of a sudden. The sculptors and performers amongst us, asking: “What the hell is wrong with all you painters!?” Max’s great agency as a painter might be in his ready understanding that he need not invent something; it's being possible to paint anything. The Danish painter Tal R has said: ‘You can’t stay an amateur but you should never forget the amateur in you because they are the painter that says simply, “I’m going to make a painting. Of something that fascinates me!” For Tal R the point of painting is to search for a personal mathematics or equation for how to use language to suggest to someone else the thing that fascinates you. To use language as simply as possible first, and second, to bend that language in the direction of where you locate yourself in that subject.