I suppose when I was about 9 years old I knew I liked drawing and painting the best and that I was OK at it . But when I was 15 I got more into specifically the painting tradition, painting like at art school or a museum as opposed to comics or illustration.

I saw The exhibitions Te Maori and a big (for New Zealand) Picasso retrospective at the auckland city art gallery on school trips.

Well oil paint is a very articulate a medium it shows the slightest touch or gesture and the interaction on touch and gesture between layers of paint. Its also the most rich and complex way to deliver colour to the eye.
Painters have so many different pigments available to them and they all mix and layer differently. Its so complex.

1 lots of thinking and dreaming
1b blue sky research into the history of visual culture
1c drawing with graphite or ink
2 digital collage and painting.
3 transfer to canvas with a projector.
4 the hard work at actual painting begins

At the moment in doing kind of ‘ensamble portraits’ ..group of characters , 3 or 4 in each painting.. more references to a Northern European painting tradition.
I value layering a colour.

It's the history of painting. Its actually a conversation up and down the generations. You just have to learn the language of paint and composition. After that it’s all human stuff emotion , dreams , human experience, it’s the feeling of being a little less alone when I look at someone who manages to put a lot of themselves on the canvas, not just trough the subject matter but utilising everything this type of object has to communicate. A good painting is a very rare thing but I’m at the end of a long tradition (not the culmination) so I get to look back on lots of good paintings.

The problem is you can’t really tell unless you have the actual paintings in front of you, painting does not work mediated through photography. So .. Im happy about the work I’m doing now . I have finished composing them and are painting them at the moment. As far as the compositions goes I’m quite confidant .
I have just finished editing an anthology of drawings and as a whole I think the book is some contribution the the field.

Thanks for the collaboration we did a few years back. I really enjoy dabbling in a bit of design with People who are good at what they do, it’s all fresh and exciting to me and the large audience Meadowlark has is exciting.