Krysten Walker-Cox was a 17-year-old high school student living in Belmont when she entered a competition to make a crucifixion sculpture for Newcastle's Christchurch Cathedral. She won.
Her life-sized ceramic work, suspended above the pulpit in the cathedral, looks like a carving from a slab of ancient tree.
There were "pipe works" near Belmont High School when Walker-Cox was a student there, and back then pipes were earthen. A bucket of clay could be bought at the pipe manufacturer for 20 cents: "I think art was essentially there always. I started quite young with clay."
As a nine-year old, Walker-Cox made wombats, but quickly moved on to human likenesses, inspired by Michelangelo's David. Not long into her teens, Walker-Cox's work had a market.
Aged 16, she was invited to exhibit professionally and a world of commissions opened up.
While Walker-Cox continued her commissioned work, she attended life-drawing classes in Newcastle, as well as travelling to Sydney for a place in the teaching studio of sculptor Tom Bass.
And she exhibited in the early days of the Cooks Hill Galleries - the gallery is on the cusp of its 50th anniversary.
A winding bush track leads to the home and studio Krysten Walker-Cox shares with her husband, painter Graham Cox, in the Hunter Valley.
The drive into the 28-acre block is punctuated by a kangaroo passing through and sculptures.
Walker-Cox and Cox met at Cooks Hill Galleries, with Cox also taken on by gallery director Mark Widdup. Cox admired her works and wanted to meet her, "there was a spirit in it that just sort of jumped at me".
But he thought she was going to be a well-established (as in quite old) artist, because her themes were stories like scenes from poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and a Shakespearean tale of King Lear and the fool.
The couple went on to create a family, living in Newcastle. Then, 32 years ago, they bought an old farmhouse set in cleared paddocks near Buchanan, which is where they have stayed. They planted thousands of trees and turned a cowshed into a studio.
During this time, Cox was a finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW five times and exhibited with the Bloomfield Galleries in Sydney. Krysten was featured in Cleo magazine and her work was sought for international collections.
Cox grew up in Sydney, and as a school-leaver had a job in offices overlooking Circular Quay. He took his lunch hour on the ferries, and many of his best-known Romantic genre works have their origins in the daydreaming of such trips.
His mother, as a girl, went on painting trips with Elioth Gruner, one of Australia's most famous landscape painters. But that was by chance, as her family stayed at a Kiama guesthouse owned Gruner's friends.
It was also by chance that a very young Cox was patted on the head by Australian Impressionist Arthur Streeton. Cox, carrying his sketchpad, was visiting a relative in hospital and accidentally wandered into the room where Streeton was convalescing.
While he had been touched by greatness, it was through his own conviction that Cox became an artist, enrolling to study in Sydney under the St Petersburg-trained painter Peter Panow who deplored "palette mud".
Wherever Cox travelled for work, he painted. The pivotal moment came when a co-worker pointed out an advertisement for the inaugural Namatjira Prize. It was for artists under 25 years, and Cox won it.
As a consequence, Cox spent time in the Adelaide Hills studio of Hans Heysen.
"He was a lovely man, he put me on the right path," Cox says.
"He showed me about composition, about repeating symbols in a picture, how you lead through and how to avoid traps."
Cox has since held almost 70 solo exhibitions around the country and continues to work on privately commissioned paintings.
Their children have grown up. Walker-Cox has carved timber harp pieces for their daughter, a professional musician. And the old paddocks around their reclaimed bush block have become large-lot housing estates.
Cox's works continue to mark time in familiar places.
He points out a bushland picture, it's a view across to the ridgeline site where the John Hunter Hospital now stands.
