Another Day

I painted a large self portrait dyptich recently for the Puke Ariki museum's Homework exhibition of Taranaki artists work. I had photographed it's stages of development from the beginning with the intention of blogging them here in "real time". However, as always with new and experimental work, I found my need to work in privacy overcame any desire to share the trials and tribulations of that working process in public. But now the painting is on the wall and the paint is almost dry, I feel more comfortable with sharing the documentation. I have for the last few years been concentrating on modest scale works in my Postcard From Puniho series. But recently I have felt the desire, confidence and ambition to do some larger scale work again.  The question is "what subject"? Well, the self portrait is a genre that I have returned to many times, especially when I feel at some kind of cross-road in my life. Just turning round and taking a good har...

Plastic Bag of Lemons Oil on linen mounted on MDF

On one of my beach walks I found this magnificent Shag, just lying there still warm, but obviously quite dead. There were no signs of distress or damage so I assume it just died of natural causes. I brought it home and made this painting of it. I had to keep spraying the flys and by the time I had finished it was starting to smell a fair bit! It ended up being a study in black.

I love guitars, and I also like making things, so in recent years I've combined these two passions in the obvious way - making guitars!  So far I've made three classical guitars and one solid body Les Paul type guitar.  This time I wanted to make a Stratocaster guitar - the strat is the one everybody thinks of when they think of an electric guitar. I had a couple of blocks of old recycled kauri timber and I thought it would be nice to have a guitar made of kauri.  I had to join three pieces to have a big enough piece for a body.  I used epoxy resin and clamped the sections together.  I then made a template from my plan, and marked out the shape of the body and used a bandsaw to roughly cut the shape out. I then used a router to finish the edges and marked out where all the various pockets for the hardware needed to go before routing them out. I then tryed to round the edges with the router but it felt uncomfortable and wasn't d...

I havn't updated this blog for quite some time! I'm not sure if anyone reads it but anyway... Here is a painting of bottles in it's early stages that I recently started. I concentrated on the transparent bottle with the red pencil in to start with, mainly because I was unsure about how to paint it. I find coloured glass much easier and more satisfying to paint. People always ask "how do you paint glass?", I was pondering this as I painted and decided  that painting glass is easy; it's painting the other side of the glass that's tricky.

I had another attempt at Anne's face last session.