Gone Fishing Last night I cooked some fresh Snapper, caught here off New Plymouth and for sale the same day, an advantage of living in a port town. In Central Otago and Southland I eat the southern Blue Cod, and of course, Bluff oysters. Well, once so far this season I admit, but there will be more to come I hope.
Before I began preparation of these fillets, I recorded this image. There is an element of flaying, an excoriation, an exposure of the underlying structure that I like. I am planning to photograph a skinned rabbit while I am in the South. Entrails I would like to work with as well. As a boy I often had to deal with entrails, of fish and fowl mainly. Sometimes sheep, sometimes rabbits.
I
going to be part of my dinner.
The Kelliher Art Prize
When I was young The Kelliher Art Prize was the big one in the art world of New Zealand.
It dominated and in some ways shaped the art scene, the work that was accepted always had a particular look to it.
I became familiar with many of the paintings (it was always paintings) that won prizes because Sir Henry Kelliher was a beer baron and the winners works were alway reproduced in calendars etc to be distributed in the hotels that he controlled. At that time my parents ran some of these hotels.
Now that I am living in Central Otago I am once again reminded of these works because many of them, in their pictorial approach, dealt with the same landscapes that I now see every day. I even find my camera being drawn to exactly the same sights. This is slightly difficult for me as this work has become so unfashionable.
I have lately been having another look at some of these paintings, here are a couple by Douglas Badcock b.1922. I can’t help feeling that there is something going on in these even though I don’t think that I would want one on my wall. Perhaps I am wrong in this. These two were recently for sale in a recent auction for less than I imagine they originally sold for.
I’m going through old photos at present. Here are a couple of me taken by my father
when we lived in Takanini in South Auckland. I lived here for the first 5 years of my life.
This sheep was one on my pets. It started off as a lamb but inevitably grew bigger and eventually my parents took it to a neighbour across the road to be slaughtered. My mother didn’t tell me this until about 40 years later. Whether or not it was offered it to me as food I don’t know, and now alas, never will.
