Artist

I left the vexations of city life and surrounded myself with the wonderful environs of the Bay of Islands over a decade ago. It is here that I have found my inspiration for my muses muses on a life lived in the Pacific.

My latest stories are being written in the formats of stamps, often actual early New Zealand stamps altered to accept and accentuate the narrative I want to express.

They are my "Ngati Pakeha Inks" - reproductions of my work printed on the very best of todays papers and inks. In these works I have fused all of the history and social study I have indulged in the last twenty yeas and my new love of the modern ink and print process. I am incorporating the latest computer technology and my well honed drawing and painting skills to manifest the stories of New Zealand on vibrant long life pigment inks on high quality cloth papers.
 
Quite unique to me are my works on tapa cloth. I use the cloth as my canvas and it becomes an integral part of the painting process. Often reforming older damaged pieces into my own compositions, adding broken shells or glass with the feature being a vibrant tuna or some other fish created in gold and silver leaf and oil. The tapa is hung from a specially made iron rod which leaves the work suspended from the wall. I feel the flowing movement created by this freedom adds a life foreign to most artworks.
 
I is a lover of the splendor of nature and how it reflects upon the wonder of my own existence. My fish drawings are an extension of that love. I want my work to work mirror the magic I sees in life…. ”Stop, look at nature and the people around us again; consider the celebration of life.” These works are a natural confluence of Euro/Polynesian style, design and thought encompassing a freedom which might galvanize us all into a special culture, unique in the World.
 
“We are a new culture on the World stage-emerging now. Each of us can speak to what that culture will be.”