Caroline Magerl has this ability as well as the talent to go one step further -
to translate what she experiences in this private place of the heart and soul on to canvas.
Many of us would stumble at the mere thought of enunciating to the world our fears, hopes, dreams and obsessions.

Magerl does it effortlessly
or at least that is how it seems
when we look at her paintings which are a curious mix of the whimsical and the worldly.

A young girl sitting quietly by an old piano ...

or standing in her swimmers by a headland.

A wedding guest oddly supine on the ground at the bottom of a hill,

her red dress stark on the green grass.

A man without a face.

These are all images from Magerl's gallery of work which draws deeply from two very distinct and different places
- her inner and outer world.

It was her inner world,
shaped by a peripatetic childhood spent mostly on boats with her mariner parents, and its need to express itself that first prompted Magerl to start painting her way out of an emotional whirlpool that threatened to engulf her as a young woman in her late teens and early 20s.

Magerl tells how she felt detached from the world and how she sought to sever this detachment by reading widely on existential subjects and of course, painting. The reading helped her get her head around how she was feeling about herself and her place in the world. However it was painting that enabled her to find a pathway to feeling connected and to make a contribution to life on this planet.

As she describes it, painting is her 'redemptive road'.

"It has connected me to myself and other people. I paint because I touch life in this way ... it gives me a place in the world."

The itch to paint comes from that inner world but if you look at her work it is easy to see how important her outer world is to Magerl, in particular her domestic surroundings peopled by her husband Mark and her daughter Jennifer.

Her dark-haired daughter, a budding pianist, often features in Magerl's work and you feel that this she is depicting two pictures here -
her child and her own inner child.

These pictures of a dark-haired young girl oscillate between calm and pensive or playful and watchful.
They evoke both love and a searching and it is not surprising that these are some of her most popular works.

Her oils often depict people but it would be wrong to simply describe Magerl as a portrait artist.
She is more a painter of feelings the fact that there is a person in the picture is not exactly accidental but rather than being obsessed with line and shape.
Magerl seems much more concerned with getting the mood right.
The result is truly a picture from the heart as well as a window in to her private and public worlds.

These days Magerl's outer world is a house in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, a few minutes drive out of Eumundi. She and her family moved there several years ago in response to a need to get out of the tightness of suburbia and to follow a dream to live a more unfettered life with chooks, a dog and a rural view from the front deck. The move was one factor that has affected the content and mood of Magerl's paintings over the past five years.

The other factor was her decision to record her dreams and thoughts in a series of albums which she uses constantly as a reference point for her work. Those who are lucky to gain access to these books will see a fascinating exercise in the journey of creativity; of how the artist is jolted into action by an experience, in Magerl's case, her dreams, her thoughts on her past and the people she has known.

The jolt could be visual or emotional
but it is there and from here the journey to a painting begins.

The books also hint are Magerl's playful side. Her paintings tend to be contemplative and deep -

as Magerl says: "I get awful serious when I paint."

But Magerl has a quick wit and a cheeky sense of humour that has revealed itself in her work as a cartoonist and an illustrator.
This is the Magerl who likes to draw her child buzzing around her as she cooks like a hummingbird and a dog with wings.

Magerl yearned to illustrate children's books ever since she was a child and this is an art which she has mastered with skill and good humour.

Books such as Castles and Do-Wrong Ron not only show Magerl's wonderful light hand as an illustrator but also a whimsical nature that in everyday life expresses itself in a love for nature and a curiosity about the ways of children, especially her daughter Jennifer.

As well as her work as an illustrator of children's books, Magerl has painted many pictures of a nautical nature which refer back to her childhood growing up on boats and an adulthood that still experiences a deep pull to the sea and the flights of fancy it offers.

Remarkably, Magerl has had no training as an artist. This has not been a drawback. If anything it has allowed her to find her own way as a painter and to do work that is truly of her own creation. In talking about why she paints Magerl says it is what she can do `in a poetic way' to transform her anxieties, hopes and dreams. We can only hope that Magerl continues her dialogue of the soul to bring us more visual poetry in the future.