Author: Peter Peryer

This author has written 801 articles


Don Driver at the Tauranga Art Gallery

Last Friday I was in Tauranga. Drove up there from New Plymouth, leaving at 11.30 am and arriving at a motel over the road from the Tauranga Art Gallery just before 5 and well in time for the opening. I drove up to Te Kuiti, turned right, looped over the north side of Rotorua. Tauranga, I am told, now has a larger population than Dunedin.

Don Driver was having a show in this new building. He lives in New Plymouth too but unfortunately was not well enough to attend the event.

There was also a selection of works from the BNZ art collection. Billy Apple spoke about the history of how this collection came about.

I liked the gallery. I saw it last when it was a handsome but empty BNZ building and the conversion had not yet begun. Many walls feel domestic in scale, and I particularly liked that and the donkey brown coloured walls too. The Drivers looked very relaxed on them I thought. It’s an Aalto colour but I don’t know the exact name although Richard Arlidge the director did, during the evening tell me but I’ve forgotten it I’m sorry. It’s similar to the much loved colour Diesel. Much loved in New Plymouth at least.

Ansel Adams used Forest Green and a Donkey Brown for the walls he exhibited on. I don’t think that photography is particularly enhanced by the white wall.

It was an excellent evening.

I’m glad that I was there.

Back in the Studio

For more than a year I have been running two studios, my main one here in New Plymouth and a satellite one in Alexandra in Central Otago. The South Island one came about as the result of having a residency there but it has now ended. Before the year in Alexandra I was 4 months in Invercargill so it has been a fair while.

In hindsight I underestimated just how difficult this was going to be, especially as I had a book being produced in Auckland in the middle of the year. Strategically this was less than ideal.

Exacerbating the problem was that while in Invercargill I made the decision to switch from using a PC to using a Mac. Right now here in New Plymouth, they are both set up side by side awaiting the arrival of a technician who will extract everything of value to me from the hard drive of the PC and transfer it to the Mac. It has been a change well worth making, but again I might have underestimated just what there was to learn and to choose a time when I had a book underway was probably not a great idea!

Now I look forward to regaining my strength. At present I am having difficulty seeing new photos, it’s been like that for about 3 months but there is no panic, it is a time of removing a lot of overburden to put it in mining terms.

De Havilland Dragonfly

Yesterday I went for a flight in this charming, precious, historic aircraft. There were something like 70 built but now there are only 2 left that are still flying. This one, built in 1936, lives at an airfield just out of Gore in Southland.

The engines are the same as used by Tiger Moths, and only about 130 horsepower. They use 91 octane petrol. Cruising speed is 120 mph.

4000 feet above Gore.


Log House

Nearby, here in Alexandra this log house has just been built. I often visit it, not because I particularly like the architecture, but because there is something about the scale of the building that intrigues me and alteration of scale is a theme that i return to again and again, although why, I have no idea.


Happy New Year

2009

A new year has started. I completely lost my blogging mojo towards the end of 2008, plain old fashioned weariness I think. Meanwhile now that my time here is coming to an end I’ve been looking at what images have come to me since I have been working in the South.

Here is one of a boar’s head, taken in late 2007, this one when I was a resident in Invercargill. For some reason I having been holding this one back.


Sluice Gate Number 1.

Over the last few days there has been a lot of rain in this area, the lakes are full and the hydroelectric dams can’t cope with the quantity of water flowing down the Clutha river past the house where I am currently living. Consequently some of the water is having to be released, not via the turbines but through one of the three sluice gates, in this case number 1.


Flying

Recently I got a couple of my kites out of storage and brought them here to Alexandra. Here is a little one made by Peter Lynn from Ashburton, one of the foremost kite makers in New Zealand. (Thanks for the photo Hamish).


Here is a photo from Peter Lynn’s website.


From the Balcony

Cloud formations as seen from my balcony a couple of days ago.

The Heat is On

The temperature in this region is beginning to climb so yesterday I sought refuge in the cool of this small forest on the edge of town. An added attraction is that the forest also contains a large collection of irises, many of which are beginning to flower.

Today I visited this waterfall.


PS Today I decided to add this postscript because I’ve had locals who, after visiting my website, are now asking me where the waterfall is. They are puzzled because they have never heard of any waterfall in this area.

The answer is that it is formed by water spilling over the Lower Manorburn dam, about 10 minutes drive from Alexandra. The dam is a part of the social history of this town because the lake that it forms during cold winters, not this one just past, freezes over sufficiently for ice skating to take place.

Newer Posts
Older Posts