The Beautiful South, a Hippie Van, and Something about Art

   For the last three weeks I've been on a kind of holiday. Holiday from much painting and drawing anyway! I flew away to the South Island just because I thought I'd like to see a certain engineering student whose dear name begins with the letter C...

    One week with friends we went hitch hiking around the three blue lakes near Mt. Cook. We slept under the stars every night and traveled on our feet or by the thumb and a smile. The landscapes all around were truly amazing. I found myself wishing for a little hippie van in which to travel around the country all on my lonesome...and to paint. I might just do that, as soon as I can... be a wandering artist, and really try to capture that beauty that surrounds one down there.

  I very much like the South Island. Everything is so much grander and wilder and more open than in the North where I live. If you have seen the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit you have only glimpsed the magic of New Zealand.

   But most of the time away I spent in the city of Christchurch where Caleb is studying. I'm quite impressed at the amount of hours engineering students spend hard at it. It seems as if they have so much to learn that they could work 24/7 and still have lots more to do. I spent a week in the University library. Lived on the fourth floor where all the art and literature books were. I believe I could spend a lifetime in there. So many books that I've been wanting to read, and that I would never otherwise be able to see. I read and read, wrote down quotes and had a mind teaming with ideas and words by the end of it.

   One book I read was full of Rodin's thoughts on art translated from the French. I was interested in what he had to say about beauty. He lived at a time when the trends in art where changing dramatically, a similar time to now, when artists were suddenly liberated by a truth which turned everyone upside-down. He spoke of seeing beauty in everything, he said that true art could make anything beautiful.

   'There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth...Whatever is false, whatever is artificial, whatever seeks to be pretty rather than expressive whatever is capricious and affected, whatever smiles without motive, bends or struts without cause, is mannered without reason; all that is without soul and without grace; all, in short, that lies, is ugliness in art' 

 

Sculptured hands by Rodin

   He was right, but those that came after him in the modern age, twisted the words to mean that 'all art could make all beautiful' and then 'art is beautiful because it is art', and eventually got rid of the idea of beauty altogether for even they could not see beauty in what they created. 'Art for Art's sake' became the motto. What happened to the amazing discoveries of the impressionists and other artists of that era that art was brought to such a low level so soon after?

    Perhaps a better phrase would be 'Art for Life's sake' after all what is art without life, truth, or meaning? I think the mistake that artists make over and over again throughout all the art movements of history is to  forget about what they paint and look at the paint itself. They forgot what they were trying to say because they found such a brilliant way of telling it, they saw it was brilliant and than all they could think of was the telling and forgot what they really wanted to say in the first place.

   “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling"― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

God grant me Grace!...

South Island Working Holiday

   I'm home again from my working holiday in the South Island. I got home almost two weeks ago and it feels like I never went away. In some ways, in others I'm changed, even a little bit of travel dose that to one. I'm going to remember some of my trip for you now.

   I flew down to Christchurch at the end of March my two friends picked me up in the blue Ford Falcon '69 and off we sped up to Nelson area. There we spent five weeks picking apples in the sunshine, well mostly sunshine, it ended up being the wettest apple season in years! It was good hard work eight hours a day six days a week. We really enjoyed our days off! It's monotonous work but it's not unenjoyable. One has lots of time to think, or not think, while picking and climbing up and down ladders. And every now and then one has a bit of excitement, one day I fell off my ladder and landed on my flat back with a full bag of apples on top of me. I was unable to pick for the rest of that day and had to lie in the car feeling useless.

Some of the things I learnt while apple picking: I learnt which end is the top of an apple, and I learnt that happiness dose not depend on my occupation, and I can find funny things and beauty in anything if I look for it. 

Here's the car we traveled around in. What fun! Dominic rebuilt it himself and spent six months driving around the country in it. The only problem with it was her appetite!

   When apple picking season was over we were out of there! It felt so good not to have to wake up at 6:30 every morning to the sound of Stan Walker singing Choose You. We spent the next three weeks traveling slowly home. We camped most nights unless we walked out to a hut. The weather was getting cold, but three of us in that tiny tent kept us warm at night.

   We went up to farewell spit, visited some amazing huts where we met more locals than when we had been in civilization. There Dom went deer hunting and came back with a goat which he smoked well salted in the chimney. It was great to have fresh meat, not cheap or easy to keep when traveling.

 There are so many amazing places to see in New Zealand. I only saw a small part of the South Island but it has made me want to spend all the more time there. There's so much more space down there, and less people, and more magnificent. Sounds ideal for a painter like me! 

 This wasn't a hut drawing trip, but I managed to draw a few that we went to. This is a hut in the Golden Bay area. A very beautiful place, but I probably didn't appreciate it as much as it deserved because it was so much like the North Island and Northland.

  On the way up we made our way slowly up the North Island. We visited the part of NZ the never really sticks out in my mind, the East coast below Hawke's Bay. There is farmland for miles there, from the mountains to the coast, and barely a tree, just grass. It was beautiful.

   We drove by the place of the longest name in the world quite unexpectedly! Then we drove around the coromandel and had two beautiful days of pure sunshine. One evening as we were starting to look for a place to camp, we decided to ask a farm if we could camp in their paddock for the night as it was getting dark, and the next free campsite was still a long way off. So we drove up to a place and, feeling rather awkward, knocked on the door; next thing we knew we had been put up in the shed. A fully furnished flat with a kitchen and sky tv! We were stunned! In the morning we found out that our host was the son of my Dad's very good friend up here. It was an extraordinary turn of events, which didn't end there. My friend, Marion, found out that she had once stayed with the people who lived next door. It was wonderful to find connections with people far away from home, it was encouraging and we went on our way heartened and the sun came out. 

    And now I'm home, I had a grand time away. I've had a good break and am already settled down into work again. And in a couple of weeks I'm off again to draw more huts. More about that project in another post.

South Island and Newsletter!! I'm off...!

   Today I leave home and on Monday I fly to the South Island. It's been my dream for years to go down there. And now I am going!!

   I'm not taking my laptop and don't hope to be in contact with the internet for the couple of months I'm away. So don't expect to hear from me online before the end of May. But when I come back I will get back on my blog and tell you all about it and share some of my sketches. I'll be apple picking near Nelson for five weeks, and hopefully get to tramp to some huts in the weekends. Here is my March/April Newsletter. In which I write a bit more about what this artists been up to lately.

  Here are just a few of the huts I want to visit and draw if I get the chance.

 I've been packing today, and look who wants to come with me! Not this time Pansy!..

Well, I'm going to go now and ride my horse, Tigger, one last time before I go. Then I've got to quickly finish packing and leave. 

Good bye.  :-)

Painting, Music, and Apple Picking

   Since coming home from hut hopping life has gone back to normal-ish. I don't have so many things-to-do on my list which is really nice. I'm learning how to limit how much I bite off, because it's exhausting and disheartening trying to chew really fast to get through everything!

   So what am I doing with myself these days? 

   I've been painting. Last week I worked on a large painting of Rocks Ahead Hut, one of the huts I drew in the Kawekas last month. Here is a small detail from the painting when it was in an unfinished state. I had only my sketch from on location and my memory to work with. I did have photos of the hut but they were taken at a different time of day and the shadows and light were completely different so there were useless to me.

   I quite enjoyed painting again. It's nice to come back to after doing mostly drawing for a long time.

   I have been reading a lot too, these days. I have two large volumes about the Impressionist painters in the ninteenth century. It's full of beautiful paintings and I am enjoying reading all about the artists like Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Dagas, Manet, etc. I love the Impressionists and there work and it is really interesting to become more familiar with their work and study their paintings and notice how really very like impressions they really are and yet what makes them so appealing and so beautiful that they have stood well the test of time and are still the most loved paintings in the world.

Monet

   I think it fascinating how all these painters who began the Impressionist movement all knew each other and influenced and encouraged one another in this new way of looking at the world and putting it on canvass. And yet they each had a different take on the same thing all contributing a certain aspect to the movement.

The Monet Family at their garden in Argenteuil. 1874 Edouard Manet

   There is so much information on the internet about these artists but it is often very confusing and possibly unreliable. I often comes across bad copies of the masters works passed of as the real thing on Pintrest and such sites when I'm looking for images of paintings. So I much prefer to read real books about artists, it's much nicer and easier to study them that way. I have just got a pile of books out of the library about Dagas and Cezanne which I am looking forward to reading through.

   When I am not painting or drawing or thinking or reading about painting and drawing I am spending a lot of time with Jenny, my piano. I am currently enjoying learning Chopin's Nocturne 2. Maybe I'll be able to play it as well as this someday:

      At the end of this month I am going to the South Island! Somewhere I've wanted to go for a long time. I'm going to join a couple of friends picking apples near Nelson for a month and then go traveling around and see a bit of my country. Of course while I'm down there I'll do the best I can to get to lots of huts to draw them for my project. The Art of a Hut.

  I'm really looking forwards to spending a couple of months down there picking apples which means earning money--a novelty for me! And then traveling around with my friends in a bright blue ford falcon '70. Lots of fun, my sketchbook will be ever at my side and when I come back I'll share them with you. So you won't hear much from me here in the months of April and May but I'm not going away just yet and I plan to do a fair bit of blogging this month.

Avoca Hut, South Island (Video)