Paintings in Koru NZ Art, Dunedin

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These paintings are for sale in Koru NZ Art, on the corner of Stuart and Castle

Streets, Dunedin. ​The lovely Sandie will always make you welcome if you wish to wander in and have a look at the real thing – which is worth it, because no photos ever show the vibrancy of many of the colours that I use. You can also email Sandie at [email protected]

Image 1:      My Sienna Track, Ghosts in Their Country, Twilight Dreaming (framed print)
Image 2:     My Sienna Track
Image 3:     The Quiet Mind
Image 4:     Ghosts in Their Country (below text)

My Sienna Track  
I began painting this after one of my many walks out on a  favoured track in the small, remote Aboriginal community of Arlparra, NT, Australia, where I lived and worked for a number of years.  Everyone looked forward to when the clouds would build up after weeks and weeks of hot, clear, blue skies; no relief from the searing sun that brought temperatures up to  and into the fifties.  As the wet came to Darwin, 1,500 odd kms from the central desert, we would all hang out for some of it to make its way south.  When the clouds started building, they became a glorious part of the most vibrant, breathtaking sunsets.  So many colours would appear in the sky, almost like a lava lamp as they wove and merged, hanging there even as the sun dropped below the horizon, finally fading long after the light disappeared. 

The Quiet Mind
This painting developed from a morning meditation where I had been particularly distracted; that thinking where one attempts to fix the mind on something beautiful.  Yes, yes, sitting by the still water…oh maybe not, now I can see things under the water. I know, a tree; yes, I love trees.  I will set my mind on a tree…oh dammit, now I have odd wildlife up the tree. I will picture myself in a bubble…ah yes, I am floating, floating…whoops, something else caught in a bubble…floating…floating….
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Ghosts

There are ghosts in their country
and like ghosts
they will fade away
remembered only
in dark night stories
when cooking fires
distort
faces into fear
memory
into myth 

Ghosts in Their Country
This work was inspired by a poem I wrote while living in Aboriginal country, thinking about all the harm done by colonisation and also by those who came with their bibles, meaning well but always according to their own cultural values; values that did not necessarily translate so well. The broken crosses represent the broken promises that came with the Christian faith.  The cross is in the first one as a harbinger of things to come; in the second as a shadow that is now heavily shadowing the people and the land; the last is the words, small because they appear as a pattern that needs closer inspection, as does the entire history.