Growing up in Guyra, it’s his art that connects him to his roots.

“I moved up here to an old church, we had no running water and no electricity – it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer,” Mr Irving said.

“One night when I was a kid we had this wind storm and you could feel it moving, you could feel it shake the whole house.

“The wind scares the hell out of me now, but its the landscape that has really influenced my work.”

Mr Irving began painting when he was a child and one of the families his mother housekept for bought him a set of paints.

“My mother couldn’t afford paints or anything like that, she was a sole earner in the family,” he said.

“She had polio when she was a little girl and always walked with a limp but she did a lot of washing and ironing around town.

“One of the fathers she worked for turned up with a brand new box of paints and a book on Norman Lindsay – so Norman Lindsay was my next hero.”

It wasn’t until years later, after working in the saw mills and abattoirs that Mr Lindsay decided to take his art more seriously.

“I tell people now, I didn’t grow up with the old people, the elders – these are the people that teach you images from ancestors and that sort of thing,” he said.

“Everything is up here, in my head.

“When I’m painting or working on an exhibition I always know what the next work will look like because it’s up here [in his head] and I can see it.”

Mr Irving is working on his latest exhibition entitled Conversation 1: Bundjalung Dreaming featuring predominantly oil on canvas works.

“I always make sure I go on opening night because that’s where you meet people,” he said.

The exhibition opens on Thursday January 19 at 6pm at the Aboriginal Culture and Keeping Place.