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Click each painting to see a detailed view.
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Masked Weather - Something Wicked This Way Comes!
72" x 60",
acrylic on wood,1994.
I made up the words then simply painted a frozen snapshot of a fine day pulsing across the sky with a witch's hat on. I love it when 3 and 4 year old children point out I haven't hung the painting correctly. They tell me the witch's hat "should" be at the top. Thank god I painted it before "Bananas in Pyjamas!" |
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A Wind-borne Flower Uprooted
108" x 72",
acrylic on unstretched canvas,1997.
This painting is a further exploration in poster form of the detailed flower in the top left of "Three Flowers Seen..." I imagined the same flower spirited away by a big gusty wind in Wellington, New Zealand. |
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Bless me, Father.....
48"x 42"
acrylic on stretched canvas, 2017.
(framed in black, signed in black on the back.)
(Acknowledgment: My friend, Murray Hepi, shared the idea in this painting with me.)
Unfortunately, I went to Catholic schools from 1961-73 (inclusive.) My experience was that I got great tuition for my first three years, & then I got the nuns & Marist Brothers who seemed to have much more ideological agendas. For example, in 1964, a nun told our class if we said "damn" we'd go to hell. I was the first kid to say dam- I told her a dam is a thing that water runs through & I might very well go to hell for being a very bad boy, but I wouldn't be going to hell for saying dam. In the next break one of my school friends said- " That was good Duncan - now what else is Sister - full of shit about ! "
Fast-forwarding to 2017 the Catholic Church seems to have four basic problems:
(1)
they are extremely slow at doing the basic research to prove themselves wrong- for example it took the Catholic Church 350 years to apologise & say Galileo was right, in 1992!
(2)
for most of the past 100 years at least, they have been largely ostrich-like when their various clergy have been accused of sexual assault. They've denied it & buried their heads in the sand.
(3)
instead of reporting paedophile predators within their ranks to the appropriate authorities, the Catholic Church has largely shunted offenders from parish to parish & school to school where, unsurprisingly, their offending has continued.
(4)
the confessional's secrecy gets in the way of mandatory reporting for sexual offences.
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In the middle of a war -
a televised footnote
from a sponsor...
36" x 30"
acrylic on stretched canvas, 2003.
The context for this painting is that I was sitting on our lounge one Friday night watching rugby league on television.
Suddenly, the telecast was interrupted with a newsflash
from the unfolding Iraq war. Live footage from Iraq showed
someone being killed in real time, right then - you could see the guns firing.
Simultaneously, ticker-taping across the top of the tv screen
were stock market updates & at the bottom of the tv screen
other football results were being ticker-taped.
This painting is the outcome of my imagining how
unrespected I would feel if I was being murdered in that moment,
instead of the person who actually was - in that moment,
those stock market updates & football results were being treated
as if they were just as significant as that person's death. |
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The Emperor's New Advertising
90 cm. diameter
circular stretched canvas, 2017.
This painting comes out of a very simple story
I heard some years ago. A mother asked her
two year old daughter what she saw in the ads. on tv.
The six words of this painting capture her daughter's response... |
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Playing around with Vivaldi's Four Seasons -
in paint & ten words...
48" x 40"
acrylic on stretched canvas,2017.
I first sketched a draft for this painting well before 2017, probably in about 2005. I painted two versions of it on New Year's Day 2010 & was unhappy with both of them. Obviously you can interpret this painting as you wish. However the following was in the back of my mind as I was painting it - recollections/memories, if you like.
1) "spring rolls " - I was imagining driving from Christchurch to Queenstown in New Zealand in September, watching all the new lambs in the rolling fields. I also imagined Chinese take-away!
2) "somersaults/summer salts" - when I was 16 Dad & Bettie bought a new home with a swimming pool & there was a tennis court next door - I thought that was heaven! Play tennis & afterwards, jump into the pool with your mates. I also imagined swimming @ Ohope beach near Whakatane in New Zealand.
3) "autumn leaves " - I imagine Arrowtown & Queenstown in New Zealand. I read somewhere that in 2003 Queenstown was voted the fourth most beautiful place in the world by 600,000 tourists in a survey! I don't know about that, but in mid-to-late April both places are gorgeous - & very cold!
4) "Tom autumn/Tom or Tim ". - just a playful pun I like.
5) "Winter Witch/ winter which " we'd been watching the BBC DVD "The Chronicles of Narnia" with our children - I imagined the Winter Witch in Narnia. |
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