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.
These two photographs of mine are in an auction catalogue, published by Art + Object in Auckland. The auction takes place on April 17th.
The top photo, on the catalogue cover, was taken in 1977. Christine Mathieson was a stylish and striking red-haired young woman who I had the good fortune to meet at the time. I think that she may have been at Elam Art School, but can’t check because unfortunately we have lost touch. She readily agreed to sit for some portraits and this was the one that I chose.
I didn’t print up many at the time, perhaps half a dozen. I may own one or two still, somewhere in my archives, but this one doesn’t belong to me. I don’t know where it has come from because, rightly so, auctioneers do not disclose that information.
The suggested price on it is $7000-$10000.
The chasuble has great significance for me. I was brought up a strict Catholic and to see celibate, educated men dressing in these soft, silken, embroidered garments made a lasting impression on me. Equally important was that they dedicated their life to a non-material ideal. For me they were like the archetypal artists, much changed now of course, where art is increasingly seen as a career, not as when I was young and inspired by these priests, a calling or a vocation.
I never printed many of these photos which is one of the reasons why the estimate on the sale price of this print being, $9000-$14000.
Rats
I have rats wanting to share this house with me, I hear the pitter patter of their little feet as they run around in the ceiling in the night. Alan, the caretaker, who handily, lives next door, has been laying poison, one large dose of which is in a kitchen cupboard.
I noticed that over the last few days it has been going down.
Yesterday as I got up and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea I could hear scrabbling noises coming from the cupboard with the bait. Gingerly I opened the door. There was a rat on its back, with it legs paddling in the air. I slammed the door shut immediately and went for Alan’s help.
I did have an idea that there might be a photo in it so before I heaved the carcass over a steep bank in front of this house, I took a took a couple of snaps, but for some reason the head shot is slightly out of focus. The tail one is fine.
I don’t feel like going down the bank to retrieve the body so I will let it go.
Jigsaw Time
Yesterday I took this photo of reflections. I took several but this is the only one
that I think has something extra. But most of all it gives me the feeling that I would love to see it as a jigsaw. There has only been one other photo that I have ever taken that I have felt this way about and it is the one below. I took it last August in a b & b in Oamaru.
On the Road Again
At last I am nearly ready to take to the road. On Sunday I leave New Plymouth and on Monday I will be on the ferry crossing Cook Strait. I even got a discount because I am now a pensioner!
From now on I hope to be making postings more regularly. This 2 months back in New Plymouth has been a strange time. I have been very distracted and have barely picked up a camera. It is in such contrast to the previous 4 months when I was was in Invercargill and which turned out to be one of the most fruitful photographic periods of my life.
I ask myself what happened when I returned because it is important that I understand. Firstly I arrived back with a bad flu which seemed to carry on right into December, through all this I struggled to get together 31 prints that I needed for a show at the Southland Museum & Art Gallery, opening right at the beginning of January. This was not my choice of a date but I decided to go with it because it wanted to get that project behind me. These 31 were photos that I took while artist in residence there. I desperately wanted to go into the New Year without too much drag from unfinished projects.
I was also very busy with getting together my choice of 80 photos to use as the core of a book to be published in September. Orchestrating these was a big task but a very important one. No sooner was I getting on top of that than I developed a bad case of blood poisoning. I am still on antibiotics and they make me feel a bit strange in the head.
Another major task over this month has been making the switch from PC to Mac. In September I bought my first Mac, a 13 inch screened Macbook. Three weeks ago I bought a 24 inch iMac as well. I want to become a power user. In the past I have been operating my PC in rather a basic way and it has been costing me a lot of time not to say psychic wear and tear.
Every day I have been spending time learning how to operate a Mac. They are very different machines. There are marvelous online tutorials, some of them in video form.
I have an iPod as well and am now learning how to operate that in a way that gives me maximum benefit eg by downloading books for me to listen to when I am travelling which I’m mostly doing on my own.
So there we have it. Flu, show, book, Mac, blood poisoning. That will be some explanation as to why I’ve not been photographing or blogging. I’ve been rather weary as well, still had no holiday for a very long time.
There may be other reasons however. Invercargill is as far away from the art scene in New Zealand as is possible to get unless I travelled another 20 minutes and moved to Bluff. I think that this helped my work to be on the fringe. In many ways the art world is a distraction for me, certainly on many occasions an aggravation. It doesn’t seem to a source of nourishment alas. I hope that this may change.