red flower, blue thorns.

I have been using oils under the lecturers recommendations and I have certainly noticed how it has changed how I’m working. I have been having issues with thinning the paint, so in these works the paint is thicker then id normally work with, but I like the qualities it has given me.

As I was painting these forms the tape wasn’t sticking to the canvas. I don’t think these forms wanted to have sharp edges. They’re buildings that have existed in my past and I now don’t remember them in the sharpness that I once did. It makes sense to me that they wouldn’t hold the same crisp edge that my normal forms would. The softness of their edges and their almost naive lumpiness is where their personality is held. To me, these shapes are nostalgic and cosy – which is exactly how a painting of my childhood home should feel like.

The first painting, “0630 (I)” (0630 being the postcode of the house) was my parents first home together in New Zealand since returning with me (3 years old) and my sister (a whopping 8 months old). it was on Beach road and this is the first house I actually have any memory of. I remember the living room, and how the couch sat on a rug in front of the Tv, I remember the kitchen and dining table, where I sat around for my 5th birthday party – an ice skating adventure that was a complete disaster, I cried – and my first ever “big girl bedroom” with a real bed in it. I used to gloat often that my ‘big girl room’ had the biggest window in the house and the best view. I could see right across the ocean to Rangitoto, and I would often wake up early to ‘watch the sky go pink’ (as I used to tell my mother.)

“0630 (II)” is a distortion of the 49a Wyoming ave house that my parents built, that once distorted is the same footprint of a home my nana had in browns bay. you will notice that it holds the “large green, small red” that we discussed in the CR class on Tuesday, and I felt like Donkey from “Shrek” going “red flower, blue thorns” over and over until he found what he needed. I felt as though I would continue to see large green small red until the day I die or until I had worked it out in a painting.