Armature for a Headland

I saw this painting in early 1986. It totally blew me away. I was eighteen.

It's quite big work-2110 x 2725 mm. Oil pastel on paper.

I saw it in Hamilton. I was in a gallery. I came around the corner and there it was. I froze. It hit me hard. It articulated a feeling in me I had no words for. I loved that a work of art could do that.

For so long, as a high school student, I'd loved looking at all those semi-rubbed out lines of chalk on the greeny-black blackboard. This work felt like that, writ large.

This work talked to something deep inside me. It made me feel I could be an artist.

I've never, to this day, been hit by an art work like this one.

That experience has stayed with me. It's a feeling I try to aim for when I make art.

The work is by New Zealand artist John Reynolds.

I met him later that same year and have done so since, every few years.

He's one of bubbliest artists I've ever met.

Same-Same, but different

The scattering of these mounds of dirt remind me of the stillness and scattering of these American footballers. I like the space between both the footballers and the dirt.

I took this in the mid-nineties when I was a student at Victoria University in Wellington. It was early summer and I think the dirt mounds had been placed there in different spots ready to fill in holes in the playing surface. This park was used for rugby and soccer training.

Austin, Texas

Another Garry Winogrand photograph taken in Texas. This time in Austin, Texas. I like Texas. I like the way the letters look written down. It makes some kind of cowboy sense that that the X is in the middle of the name.

Over the years I've been there around three or four times. Mainly Dallas, but also Houston and Galveston and some smaller towns. Each time has been a slightly strange experience. I was there, for example, just days after Hurricane Katrina. That was a strange mixed up time for the locals and the people pouring in from New Orleans. So much, more than water, was rising to the surface.

There's a connection for me with Texas and my photographs. A relationship of sorts, but I don't, as yet, know what it is.

Not moving, Still

I took this picture about four years ago. I like how it looks, like it's captured something moving, but it hasn't. It's a still rock. I seem to be attracted to this oxymoron; a still, moving picture. In contrast to this, but probably connected, a lot of the movies I am drawn to have a moving stillness to them.

I like movie directors and their cinematographers who are able to slow down time in the way they pace a movie. Two movies I've been enjoying like this are Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control and This Must be the Place starring Sean Penn and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Many of the shots in these movies are like still photographs that move.

There's something about this slow pacing I find poignantly beautiful.  It seems to allow the viewer more time to contemplate the ideas being communicated. This is probably why I'm attracted to the still photos of certain photographers and what I look for or desire in my own work; a pacing which allows for a contemplative space, a mental intimacy.

Mother and Child Reunion

I saw a show of Garry Winogrand's in New York in July, 1988. I was twenty and New York was the first place overseas I went to. From the rural province of Hawkes' Bay, New Zealand to New York. It was quite a contrast!

It just so happened a show of Garry Winogrand's was on at the MOMA. At twenty I didn't know who he was, but, I think, this show had a profound effect on me in terms of composition.

In his photos something was happening in every nook and cranny of the image. A little shoe popping into the lower left of the picture or a cat swinging out of the picture by the tail. All the elements working in this incredible, sometimes manic, harmony.

Although my photo here is very different in content to his, the importance of the placement of every little, no matter how insignificant, is still there.

Garry Winogrand

"In the end maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed it is something else." Garry Winogrand

When I was a Hospital, 2010

I took this in Dunedin when I was walking between Brett McDowell's gallery and Jeffrey Harris' studio. It's not a far walk and the old stone shadowy buildings give it a strange other worldiness. It feels like you're walking in an old black and white movie.

It was strange seeing these words written on this building. I had a show at the time with Brett and he had in his office, sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, quite an early picture of mine called, "When I was Little."

Brett had relayed to me the story of how one day "When I was Little" fell off his office wall and the glass, in the frame, broke. Brett said he actually couldn't help worry if something bad had happened to me.