The first post

Well, why not? It seems like fun. It's not as if I've got anything particular to say, but I can be pretty opinionated at times. I'm pretty slack as well though. One of these days I'll get around to updating my website (which I haven't done for quite a wee while now - the one that's there was just meant to be a trial version). Maybe I'll even get around to hosting this blog on it (this way's simpler - it didn't involve any weird technical bizzo). Like I said, I'm pretty slack.

I live in Wellington, New Zealand. I'm a freelance editor (so any spelling and grammatical mistakes here will be pretty embarrassing, but, hey, it's always difficult reading your own work, which is why they hire people like me). I'm also a painter. I've got some pretty firm opinions about painting. Some people reckon painting's dead. Arthur Danto even dated when it died at 1963 (Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes). Sure, that kind of nailed Abstract Expressionism, not to mention the whole idea of there being a dominant style of painting, but to say it killed off the several thousand year old practice of painting is just silly. Maybe that wasn't what he was saying though. I'm really into figurative painting. I like doing work that's quite crude and simplified. I'm not into virtuoso-type stuff.

I started off doing work related to New Zealand's colonial past, as exemplified by Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, the famous Maori warrior and prophet (the religion he founded, Ringatu, is still around today), and Captain Cook. After a while, though, I got bored with New Zealand-specific paintings. I did some Illuminati-related paintings for a while. These were based on news photos I found on the Internet. I did a few of those that I quite liked. I even entered a five-part work on paper one in the Wallace Awards, but they told me where to go.

At the moment, I'm doing what I call Skeleton Guy paintings. They're kind of self-portraits. The idea for these came about because I was reading about the gnostic influences on existential philosophy while doing a first aid course. I really like making associations between wildly different things. I think they're often the most fruitful.

We're having the crappest summer in the world at the moment. According to the boffins at the Metservice, January was the wettest on record. Halfway through February, we'd had twice the average rainfall for the entire month. That was before the massive storm last weekend. At the moment, it's pissing down again and blowing a gale. This is not good so soon after the storm. Lots of places are still flooded.