Exhibition opening night (and my 6 still lifes in oil)

Here are some photos from the NZ Art Guild North Island Members Exhibitions which is currently showing at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna, Auckland for the rest of May. To be honest, actually getting 6 paintings completed and hung was a major achievement for me given the amount of things going on in my life at the moment (more on that in another post).

I am really happy with how this series turned out overall (although I can look at individual paintings and see things I would like to change as per normal) and I am satisfied that I did manage to do a mini series of still life's which I have wanted to do for a long time now.

For me, as I have mentioned before, it is about finding the beauty in the ordinary. The best gift I believe I have received from being an artist, is the openness to the beauty that is all around us at any time. I feel that I spent many years caught up in my head space not noticing things and only occasionally sitting down to watch a beautiful sunset or to appreciate the waves crashing on rocks.

Now that appreciation is a daily thing. Each morning I drive on Tamaki Drive to work which is along Auckland's waterfront. I leave home early so I catch the early morning sun rising and the reflections on the water, the boats moored in the placid ocean and the sky golden over Rangitoto are awe-inspiring. It makes me want to stop my car and just soak it in.

So while these paintings are of vegetables and fruit, they are not about that to me. It is about the true beauty in the things we take the granted, especially the gifts of nature that nourish us and provide us with the means to live and flourish. It is about appreciating that humble orange, enjoying the glow in the sunshine and then when you open it and eat it, that rush of pure sweet goodness. It is the pepper or the onion that provide that taste sensation and also just look so good. If I could hope for anything from this little series, is that maybe one other person may look at a humble vegetable or fruit in just a slightly different way and see the beauty that they may not have noticed before.