COVID MANDALA (2020)
During a grindingly long Covid lockdown, some bright New Zealanders sought to cheer up creatives by challenging them to create mandalas made up of found objects. You couldn’t go shopping, of course, so the trick was to find useful items in or near home. I spent a whole happy afternoon putting this one together from flowers, fruit, sticks and stones. It still lives, along with many other marvellous creations, at
SEASHELL GEOMETRY (2021)
For several weeks in art class I was photographing, handling and examining a seashell until I knew it almost inside out. This was just a small nine-inch square rendering of my shell reduced to white-pen leylines, which produced what I thought was a rather satisfyihg geometric layout.
BISCUIT DECONSTRUCTION (2022)
If you’re a fan of competitive cooking shows like Masterchef – yes, me too – you’ll be familiar with how fancy cooks like to ‘deconstruct’ classic dishes to create something new on the plate. I began here with a painted plain brown biscuit or cookie (looks like a Griffins Gingernut to me!) and got to work with coloured and lined paper shapes and glue to collage a layout extending past the biscuit’s borders. Every artist asks themselves when they know each piece is finished. With something this random that’s hard to answer, but you do somehow intuit the moment of being pleased, finally, with the balance of shapes and colours.
CUT AND PASTE (2024)
This is an echo of my early time in magazine production, when writers would send in typewritten copy and I would sometimes need to physically cut and paste strips of text onto fresh paper to rearrange paragraph order. Computers cut and paste words with ease now, with few users realising it was once done with scissors. The spiky line of collage at the foot of the work is text shapes snipped from a magazine I used to edit.
MAD ABOUT ART
(My mother Marion in a rare moment, around 1950, when she had time to be an artist.)
I wish I had a photo of my mother’s wooden art box. My memory tells me it buckled shut with worn leather straps. It sat around for years in our messy basement but she rarely got to open it because she was raising her family and looking after her mother and two childless elderly aunts who were forever needing her.
I keenly remember the smell of turpentine and her tumbled tubes of paint, though she had so little time to use them. She’d earned an arts degree at Elam in Christchurch, my mum, but her talent was crushed by the pressure of post-war, 20th-century domesticity. She did manage to paint enough, however, that my brother and I both have her work on our walls, and her love of art trickled down to me too.
She died far too soon and did not ever get to see great museums and art galleries. If only I could have taken her along when, eventually, I was the lucky one who got to stand close up to canvasses created by the likes of Matisse, van Gogh, Monet, O’Keefe and Rothko.
I did a fine arts prelim diploma in my 20s and then got immersed in words. Now, many years later, it’s my turn to have a box full of paints and brushes as I go to art classes, work on my practice and, sometimes, put my own art on my walls.
ARTWORKS
When I’m not reading, writing or caught up in everyday routine (the walking, the movies, the coffees, the cooking, the seeing of friends and hugging of grandchildren) I’m trying to be a better artist. Pushed and encouraged by tutors at Browne School of Art, I get lost in the act of creation. Making art is much like writing. With writing, the starting point is you and a blank screen. With art, it’s you and a blank canvas. It leads to frustration and angst. You may get frustrated, paint over, discard and restart – and every now and again, yay! Glimmers of progress. My pleasure mostly comes from playing with acrylics, inks and collage.
PIRONGIA TREE (2023)
The thing about abstract painting is that what you finish up with can seem a thousand miles from where you began. ‘Go photograph something in your environment and use that as your starting point,” said the art teacher. I was house sitting for country friends then. There was a tree in a field that I liked, so I captured it on my phone. My first few small paintings did look like actual trees. But then I went all cosmic and conjured up this tree spirit, a translucent globe made of green and blue acrylics with touches of metallic gold.
SLIPPING INTO SOMETHING MORE COMFORTABLE (2022)
I’m very fond of how Auckland’s classic wooden villa verandahs are adorned with pretty fretwork. While researching my novel Scarlet & Magenta, I read avidly about many domestic dramas that went on behind the fretwork more than a century ago. Generations have now lived inside those walls and this work combines areas of fretwork pattern with fragments of Victorian wallpaper and a vintage clipping of a 1950s Berlei corsetry ad.
DIMENSIONS OF EXPERIENCE (2023)
The many transparent layers here are meant to reflect how we slip in and out of distinct moods as life carries us along. We veer between contentment and struggle. Experiences appear and then fade as each day brings a fresh flush of moments to see, feel and be moved by. Acrylics and pen on paper.
Neverending Pressing Engagements (2024)
As you browse other artists’ work you become aware of how even the most mundane of domestic items can be fodder for the creative spirit. For a while I thought I might give playful treatment to a range of household appliances. But just as ironing can become boring, so too can even thinking about it. Still, I did enjoy doing this acrylic on canvas of my steam iron. And was amused at a class show-and-tell when some people didn’t even know what it was. “Phoof!” said one. “Who even irons anything at all these days!”
Happy At The Canvas
At work on an abstract piece that I never did get around to finishing. I must haul it out and try again! But I was very much in my happy place here at a class run by the brilliant Evan Woodruffe * One way of telling you’re an artist is that the apron becomes ever more stiff with paint as time goes by. Just as it should.
