Michael Beamish was once a haematologist, now he's painting with syringes

He calls it a "mixture of psychics and art."

The former haematologist - a specialist doctor focusing on the diagnoses of blood diseases, and one of the founders of Launceston Pathology - has become an artist without a brush.

Instead, in an echo of his history, he uses a frequent tool of his old trade: a syringe.

Beamish, a "ten pound pom" who moved to Australia from Britain in the '70s, began seriously painting in 2018 shortly before his retirement from a full career in the world of medicine.

The English emigre has since been part of multiple exhibitions at venues across Launceston, and has completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania.

At first, he painted with regular equipment like rollers and brushes, but the call of his past scientific work has led him to this new style of production.

Placing his canvas flat on the ground and, choosing his liquids carefully - depending on their viscosity and density - Beamish drips his colours and allows them to spread, like a medical Jackson Pollock.

"You're allowing the paint to do its thing, that way, you can build a picture," Beamish said.

The result is abstract, with colours sometimes blooming rapidly or seeping out slowly, microbially. And, although it might seem random, there is definitive control and intent.

"People always say, 'Well, what do you see in [the painting]? Which isn't the idea of abstraction,'" Beamish said.

"A house? A flower? A hill or something like that? - no, I'm looking for energy; I'm looking for the energy that the painter has put into that painting.

"I might be less physically involved with this form of painting than I was when I started - and I plan to go back to that form with rollers someday - but that's still the effect 'm hoping to achieve."

The careful, energetic impetus of the artist's hand is nowhere more evident than in the workshop below Beamish's Trevallyn home.

Various test tubes of paint litter the space - many ready for rolling in medical mixers - and plenty of canvases bear the annotated marks of experiments where he tests the speed of the liquid's spread.

The workshop is, in some sense, Beamish's testament to the two great loves of his life, a pair that are often seen as opposing forces: science and art, reason and irrationality.

"There's a lot of commonality there between my time as a fluid pathologist and a painter now that I'm retired," Beamish said.

"I'm applying the things that I was doing at work to what I'm doing creatively."

But, despite some similar steps to his painting and profession - that "there is that predictability to it, in some sense" - Beamish believes there are a few major differences.

"In the work I was doing as a haematologist, we needed that predictability to produce change that would help a patient, but art is different," he said.

"Art is liberation, art is energy."