Thick paint usually signifies a belief in cathartic self-expression. As the tidal wave of a return to painting has subsided, the link between brushy rhetoric and autobiography has now become such a cliché that artists who wish to demonstrate their awareness of the self’s contemporary erasure are expected to work clinically. Yet Davida Allen’s reputation within Australia has so far escaped question, even though she is above all a self-consciously autobiographical artist. Her paintings are about her private life as the mother of several children and about her role as a housewife who paints. She