Overall, his career in architecture helped him to realise his creative impulse more clearly.  “I found I was always constrained by purely practical considerations – such as a budget, regulations, functional requirements and buildability,” he explains.  “I needed to express my creativity free of these limitations so I started to paint as hobby in 1969.”  This would often be done at night after a long day at the office, sometimes continuing until the early hours of the morning.  He started off putting different colours together using a style “just like children’s finger painting”.  Now he allows the creative process to take him wherever he feels it leads him along the way.

Dots and lines form a significant part of Ernie’s paintings and he maintains they are the basic elements of design as a whole.  “Dots allow different colours to be put side by side and then those colours blend together in your eye (or more accurately in your mind), producing a new colour.”  Many have looked at the presence of these dots and seen aboriginal overtones, but Ernie points out that the work of other cultures, such as Hungarian embroidery and Persian rugs which influenced some of his earlier paintings, employs a similar use of dots.

Ernie loves the purity and intensity of abstract art.  “I look at abstraction as the process of reducing and distilling the essential elements from a landscape, for example the colours, rhythm, mood and feel of the place,” he says.  Getting rid of unnecessary detail and extracting the most important features of a scene what really matters, according to Ernie.  “I try to go beyond the hillside, sunshine, vines, grapes and wine to find the final product, the concentrated spirit -- the brandy,” he illustrates.

Ernie believes this ‘filtering’ process is well-suited to the subject matter of the natural Australian landscape.  “Wilderness by its nature is untamed, overwhelming, and awe-inspiring – unless we simplify it, it is beyond our comprehension to take it all in,” he says.  According to Ernie, getting down to the basics is not as easy as it might seem, and not many do it well.  “Good abstraction leapfrogs the trivial and bypasses the intermediary to convey information directly,” he states.  “Bad abstraction is contrived and forced and can very easily become clichéd.”

Ernie’s favourite place to paint is in the studio, working from memory.  He says that painting in situ can become too much of a distraction with the details of a scene clogging up the mind.  In fact, he often finds the best paintings inspired by the environment are those done a while after he has visited a place.  For example, his Uluru desert paintings were not done until five months after his return to Sydney.  “By then, the experience had really been absorbed,” he says,” and for me it’s more about the etched in the mind memories than something that’s in front of me.”

Exhibitions have provided Ernie with opportunities to talk to the public about his work and to gain an insight into the perceptions of his viewers.  Quite often people will look at my paintings and tell me they see things I haven’t seen,” he says.  “There is more than one meaning in my work – some might see a night sky, others might see an underwater scene.”  It has also given Ernie an insight into the opinions.  “Many people are puzzled by abstract art,” he comments.  “They are looking for ‘what does it mean?’ rather than letting go of their intellectualising and just allowing the intuitive process to take over – then they could just say they like it or don’t like it, just as they would if they heard a new musical piece.”

While selling paintings naturally has its benefits, Ernie says the real achievement comes when his viewers not only find his work attractive, but also find it speaks to them.  “My main aim in being an artist is to produce artworks that is meaningful to people,” he says.