With the Internet, an artist can live in a rural backwater and still feel in touch.
(The dog was Molly, an enthusiastic oaf of a bearded collie. Killed by a car.)
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Born 1943, Midhirst. Shifted from there to Inglewood to New Plymouth, then around the coast to Puniho.
Apart from the years away at University and a couple of years travelling .... the mountain always pulls
me home. Studied maths & physics, & after a very brief spell as nuclear physicist and a year doing research into carbon fibre (in London) I tried teaching and found I loved it. I like students. Always pottered at the art stuff, but it was always on the side. TACO - the Taranaki Artists' Cooperative - did me the honour of taking my art seriously and that completely reshuffled my self-perception. Still wasn't brave enough to give up on teaching (status as well as income - this is a society where you're defined by what you're paid to do) but became more and more part-time at it. When our daughter Toby was born I used her as an excuse to leave the job and become a full-time artist. Love it! Toby is off being a doctor now. Her father, Paul Hutchinson, has been a full-time painter all his life. Toby was home-schooled until she was 15, so we could all stay home and play. A sweet life. You ask about where I get the ideas for my assemblages. The things sort of make themselves ... I collect all this lovely stuff and I'll wander around my studio (wander isn't the word ... it's more like picking my way over the piles!) holding it, finding things that sing with it, that look as though they belong together, that start to make their own story. An object by itself can never be more or less than what it is, but when it's with something else they start to play off each other, to inter-relate, to tell stories. Especially old things, that carry their own history. |
On Komene Beach
It's a long beach, clean black sand, good surf.
Lots of driftwood at the high tide mark for making fires and cooking sausages.
With Mt Taranaki peering over the sand dunes.
Toby was younger then. Weren't we all?
Not a bad life, not bad at all.
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