Entry 1

Life, love and origins

The rain stopped sometime over night. It’s Sunday morning. Maybe sunny all day. A cold wind competes though. It’s winter after all. Sun and warmth are most welcome.

I’m thinking of the colours of love and a long river of life that I oil-painted many years ago on a 770x550 cm board. Now, I see that the painting needs fibre, harakeke muka included. The intervening years are responsible for this thought. They brought more knowledge, woven knowledge...and love, more and more.

See that woman and the child she holds. That could be me although my real son wasn’t yet conceived when I made this painting. My living, breathing son turns 31 soon, so he’s some 4 years younger than it. These days, I can see myself portrayed and the baby’s indistinct features could be confirmed as a portend of my eventual and very real motherhood. Let’s say they do and that this journal entry is happening along a story of love, life and origins that began all those years ago.

A river begins sparkly, fairly narrow and quite shallow, closely located to a high mountain and riverside terrain. It builds momentum from its source, sometimes naively, pushing forward. Such are also the days of early enterprise and creativity. Early days of life and oil paint eventually harden and dessicate, perhaps requiring repaint, varnish, even illusion, as years pass. Increased depths, widths and blood-letting become apparent as does a life-loss set of learnings in circular form. By the river-side, mature now, I sit cradling new life. Love grows and knowledge, like precipitation, moist and fertile, settles in kete, as it did in ancient, deified times. Whiria, a mountain of our origins and new discoveries, sits like shelter, beside us.

Across the river, balance, equality and spiritual journey are a very palpable aspiration and reality. For me, as I continue, closer now to where rivers meet sea, that side of the river remains as true to me as when the paint was new, slick and wet. It remains in my psyche as warm comfort, daily fresh aspiration, inspiration and deep-set love.

All that said though, the flow of sky, river and spiritual terrain of this artwork tells me that woven forms, around and protruding off the canvas could happen. Let’s see where such telling takes us. Perhaps the painting now asks for fibre because life itself has become interwoven. Motherhood, whakapapa, loss, learning and belonging no longer appear to me as painted surfaces alone. They arrive indispensable, as strands, crossings, tears and ties.