"Towards Punakaiki"

Here are three new paintings just completed and ready to go of to galleries. Painted from recent trips including "Towards Punakaiki" from our Easter trip. "Spring Thaw" is on the way to Milford Sounds and "Golden Sands" is near Kaiterteri.

"Golden Sands"











"Spring Thaw"

I have just returned from Arrowtown Autumn Festival where I am Guest Artist from April 16th to May 16th. at the Lakes District Museum & Gallery. I also had the difficult job of judging all the other art works juried into the show with over $4000 in prizes on offer ..... very stressful and extremely difficult as the there are very high number of very good professional artist live in the area who as I found out enter this exhibition. Any way I survived the opening night and got some very positive feed back on my award choices I made and some very good feedback on my speech which surprised me because I was as nervous as hell and I 'm not a good speaker at the best of times.
The exhibition creates a lot of interest and has around 10,000 visitors over the 4 weeks it runs ...... which is amazing exposure for an artist.
It also enabled me to meet up with many of the artist in the area and the next day visited one or two of there studios at there invitation. One of them was Ben Ho and his wife Mary Mai who have moved in to the district in the last 12 months. The have a fabulous new home and gallery/studio setup and both extremely good artist.

Here are the six paintings I entered as guest artist in the 26th Autumn Festival Art Exhibition,

" Cruising",
"A Floral Treat"
"Dining Room Vista",
"Catching the Southerly",
"Autumn Refreshments", and
"Arrowtown".

My First Post ........ Well I have finally taken the plunge and set up a blog. I am basically sitting at home full of a cold feeling sorry for my self ... no energy to paint or do much needed work in the garden ....... so what better to do than sit at computer and set up up a blog. Of course I will need to keep up dating but I am pretty committed now so should be OK ... well we will see.
I feel blogging will enable interested people to follow my work and understand my thought processes or inspiration. So here goes .........
I will start with some photos from a trip to the West Coast over Easter in a hired camper van .... just me and Sharon and no kids ........ staying at Punakaiki and Karamea. As you can see from the photos its like a lost world over there and we are aiming to go back again very soon to explore more and do some on site paintings and drawing.













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