In this issue

1. My Print of the Week

2. Frontispiece

3. Expressing the Wind

4. Poem of the Week-Autumn Song

5. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

6. Endpapers

My Print of the Week

We all have our favourite places.

I know we do.

Some of us love to live deep in warm, damp, armpit valleys, surrounded by comforting hills. Others of us love to live beside the sea, to be able to look out and away across the water because the ocean is the Highway to Everywhere.

I have always loved high wild places, where the wind pushes at me and keeps me off balance and outside my comfort zone. High wild places encourage me to look out. And beyond.

One of my favourite places is St Bathans Downs Road in the Manuherakia Valley of Central Otago. The road snakes and slithers down the spine of the ridge, weaving its way down to join the main highway. However, the best place is beside the lone pine tree partway down the road. The best time to be there is in the late afternoon when the sun is close to sinking behind the Dunstan range. The icing on the cake is when the warm Norwest wind herds cow clouds across the sky meadow to the east.

My dear friend Sam and I had been travelling all day, and we were heading back towards our accommodation in the Maniototo.

Just above Becks, before you cross the river, I abruptly turned left and headed onto the road going up to the Downs. Sam blinked (about as emotional as he ever gets) and then asked:

"Why are we going this way?"

"Oh, I replied, "I've got a feeling."

And so we followed the road rising up and up and up, and all the while, I was watching the weather and the building Norwest front. As I stared out the window at the weather, A building tension inside me told me something was happening, that very shortly we would have the chance of making a beautiful image.

When I pulled up, the symphony of the sky was building to a crescendo. There is no time to think about technique in moments like this except for the Golden Rule: f8 and be there.

Then the moment was gone, the orchestra sank back in silence, the earth unwound to the east, and the sun lowered itself behind the curtains of the night.

Please consider securing a copy for yourself if this scene resonates with you.

Six only prints. A2. Printed on fine art cotton rag paper, signed and shipped free to anywhere in Aotearoa (a little more if you live offshore).

Usually $600, $400 for this week only.

Oh, and there is a secret bonus for anyone who orders.

Ring, message or email me ([email protected])

Frontispiece

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Welcome

Nau Mai Haere mai:

Let me offer a big welcome to all of you joining the newsletter for the first time. I'm very aware of how many of you there are and where you're located. The Netherlands, Germany, Australia, the US, the UK and Ireland, and our beautiful Aotearoa/New Zealand. I'm also very conscious that this newsletter is an important part of the week for a number of you.

More about this in the endpapers.

Times of Change

Here in Te Anau, we are in that beautiful time between seasons. We have glorious warm sunny days where the wind holds its breath and everything seems still and peaceful. Any cold fronts blowing up from Antarctica tend to be channelled away to the east coast by the fortress walls of the Takitimu mountains away on the southern horizon. However, early autumn's still, rich warmth is beginning to yield to the incoming suggestion of approaching winter.

I suppose I've been here long enough (four years) to begin to get a sense of the weather patterns. Soon the tradewinds will start to blow in earnest, and we can expect them to start to make their way in from the Tasman Sea.

For some reason, I'm pretty sensitive to shifts in the weather. Perhaps that sensitivity comes from years of photographing the land and the areas above it, of trying to feel what is happening around and above me.

On Thursday evening, I looked up at the sky, and Taawhirimaatea, the God of the winds, was paintbrushing delicate feathers of cloud across the underside of the sky. Ah, I said to myself, some weather is coming. The nature of the clouds told me to look westwards and be prepared for cloud rollers to sail in over the top of Te Puhi-a-Noa, the Murchison Mountains, which underscore the sky to the West.

And sure enough.

At 3:30 am on Friday, I suddenly woke up. While I was asleep, the wind had washed in over the mountains, slithered across the lake and was picking fitfully at the corners of my home. Then, finally, it snuck up to my open bedroom window, pulled back the curtains and poked its head inside.

Of course, I got up and went outside to say good morning to it. I walked out onto my sneaky grass, which continues to bulk out furtively, and felt for what the wind wanted to say.

I was also a little bit worried about the tomato plant in front of my garage door. Despite my best attempts to save it from the wind's spitefulness, it has blown over several times. I stand it back upright, apologise to it, feed and water it and hope like hell. At the moment, it is laden with green tomatoes, which I hope will ripen before the frosts finally come in mid-late April. I am well aware that the growing season here in the south is short. And time is running out before winter stamps its cold foot on all this growth.

Time will tell.

For some reason, this week's issue is all about the wind and the skies above. That may be because I have a strong sense that my project with flowers and the world writ small is nearly complete.

For now.

As I've said lately to the people attending my zoom presentations about photography and art (and there have been a few of those lately!), there comes a time when you know that it is time to move on. The great artist David Hockney puts it this way:

And lately, I have found myself more interested in what is happening above me than what is below. I may have a few images left to make, but already I'm feeling the pull to working with grander material.

I wasn't sure where this newsletter would go, but I will have to mihi (shout out/honour) Taawhirimaatea for dropping by the other morning and showing me which way to take it.

This week's newsletter is all about the wind and windsong.

Enjoy.

Expressing the Wind

For a long time, I have felt that the richest vein artists can mine is themselves.

After all, if art is about expressing what we see and feel, then it stands to reason that we need to explore inwards to discover how we see outwards and find what is authentic for us. And, once we have found that path, we should follow it, wherever it leads, and without being diverted from it by what others would have us see and do.

I was born in the Maniototo region Central Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand. To the best of my knowledge, I was made one dark and stormy night (I hope I was-I've been trying to live up to it ever since) in the tiny former gold-mining village of Naseby. My father worked for the New Zealand Forest Service and had been posted there from Southland as Officer-in-Charge. By all accounts, he was very good at his job.

I grew up in a cob house with stone walls one metre thick. My father would light the fire in April and allow it to go out in November.

My early memories were of a vast expanse of land, a great dome of blue sky, and icy winters. At night I would listen to the wind sifting through the pine forest behind our house. Those things engrain themselves in your soul.

When we moved away to Canterbury, I was four years old and certainly never imagined I would come back to live.

In 2006 I returned for a six-month stint as Artist-in-Residence. It was an open assignment, where I could do whatever I wanted. The only requirement of my residency was to produce an exhibition at the end of it.

When I arrived, I had no idea what I would do, other than that I would. For three weeks, I looked around myself, wondering what path I would take and not seeing anything of significance.

Then, one night, having a quiet drink in the bar across the road from my flat, I listened to the local farmers, who would bring their families in on Friday night from the countryside to catch up. They were discussing an impending storm due to arrive the following day. The discussion revolved around moving their stock into shelter to protect them from what looked to be a significant weather event.

A penny dropped.

For those of us who live in the city, a major storm can cause extreme difficulty, but it very rarely impinges directly upon our livelihoods. In a community where 96% of the population were dependent upon farming, mainly sheep and beef, it was literally a matter of life and death. A dead stock unit (read: animal) meant a diminished financial return, and the whole district paid the price for it, not just the farmers themselves. It came to me.

The weather and looking up at the sky was serious here.

I remember walking outside and looking up at the sky. Finally, I had found the line of enquiry I would take. Suddenly my landscape photographs involved sky and weather patterns, with only a tiny amount of land occupying the bottom of the picture frame. It was, after all, all about the weather.

After six months and a successful exhibition, I moved back to Canterbury.

Circumstances brought me back to live in Ranfurly some seven years later. With time and experience, and more life journeys under my belt, I saw things differently. It was still about the vast skies, but one of my enquiries was to look down upon the land from above.

If there is a visual marker point for me, it is Little Mount Ida, which stands above the landscape and can be seen from most directions. You get up there by a hairy four-wheel drive, and once on the summit, the view is virtually 270°, with the only exception being the petrified stone point break waves of the Hawkdun Mountains to the north.

I love to go up there. On the summit is a giant telecommunications tower, and the only sound is the wind moaning, complaining and attempting to flake the paint from the steel structure. Late in the afternoon, you can stand up there and watch the silent waves of stone weaving their way south. Then, as the sun slides down the arc of the sky to the West, the shadows begin to creep eastwards, filling in all the cracks and wrinkles of the land.

One evening in June, I was up there with a photography class. A Norwest wind had been blowing on and off throughout the day and squeezing long skeins of cloud onto the sky.

I was wandering back to talk to a group of my students when I glanced over my shoulder. And stopped. There was an argument going on above the mountains as if Taawhirimaatea was fighting with one of his brothers. He was obviously upset and waving his hands around in anger. The clouds rose and fell in an angry pattern. I took as many images as I could, then moved back to what I was supposed to be doing.

It was only years later that I found a way to best express what I had observed that day. But, first, I had to liberate myself from the chains of other people's judgement and the tyranny of photographic conventions. When I discovered Symbolism, particularly the Russian Symbolists, this artwork found its voice.

For people like Nicholas Roerich, everything is symbolic; everything is a metaphor. The world in front reflects the world within:

Ki Roto, ki Waho.

As within, so without.

At the same time, I was exploring the work of the Expressionists and what they stood for, in particular their leanings towards synaesthesia. Then I found this wonderful quote by Expressionist painter Franz Marc:

There it was.

The turnstile beyond the fence of convention into the meadow of creation.

I made a printed work of it, which hung in my lounge for a couple of years. Then, one day, a visitor came by. She stood there, looking at it in wonder for some time.

It went away with her to find pride of place in her home in Northland.

Poem of the Week-Autumn Song

― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

The poetry thing seems to be drawing me at the moment, calling me to write and share.

Yes, I know this is a reshare, however it feels right for today.

Autumn Song 

Summer has passed its use-by date

sliding glumly away over the edge of the earth to the north,

as Autumn casts its clammy cloak across the cooling earth,

with tentative, tentacled mists slinking slyly in the slouching dawn

and the false promise translucence of sun-stretched pizza dough skies.

Proudly alone and left to a task of their particular devising,

the ignored and forgotten docks have been rising in a roaring ruddy revolution,

plucking threads of sun and life from the breathless weave of the sun-stoked air,

drawing them down to fashion

a tightly-tufted tapestry of cyclic completion.

Rich. rusted seedheads knitted onto slender stalks

stand stiffly to attention,

in expectant anticipation

of the sharp-tongued wind-generals of winter

who will order them loose and away,

to conquer foreign overseed lands.

Now the purple frown of Autumn’s crown

has engraved itself in withered warpaint

onto the drying and furling surfaces,

the crenellated crinoline edges

of dejected, defeated leaves

fading beyond redemption.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion — www.themarginalian.org

Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally.

The Women of the Bauhaus School — www.artsy.net

The male icons of the early-20th-century Bauhaus school, like Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Paul Klee, are some of the most celebrated pioneers of modern art.

Are You an Echo: The Remarkable Story of the Forgotten Young Woman Who Became Japan’s Most Beloved Children’s Poet — www.brainpickings.org

In 1966, while leafing through an obscure book, a 19-year-old Japanese aspiring poet by the name of Setsuo Yazaki discovered a poem that stopped him up short with its staggering generosity of empathy and existential truth conferred with great simplicity: BIG CATCH At sunrise, glorious sunrise it’s

Last-minute dinner sorted: Cook Mexican beef and beans tonight — www.stuff.co.nz

Welcome to Dinner Sorted: Last Minute, a new daily edition of our weekly meal-planner Dinner Sorted. Each weekday, we’ll bring you a recipe for a simple, tasty dinner that will please your family without driving you off the deep end.

How Bosch Experienced his Own Kind of Hell — hyperallergic.com

Around the turn of the 14th century, for reasons still not completely clear, the average annual temperature underwent a precipitous drop for the next half millennia during what scientists have termed a “Little Ice Age.

Obscura No More — theamericanscholar.org

At the midpoint of the 20th century, anyone venturing into a gallery or museum would have been hard-pressed to find any photographs on view among the displays of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture.

Why Avant-Garde Artist Man Ray Was an Important Link Between Two Famous Art Movements — mymodernmet.com

The early 20th century was an exciting time for avant-garde art. After Impressionism, more and more movements began to blossom, led by innovative artists with original ideas on aesthetics. Two of the most iconic movements to be born during the 1900s were Dada and Surrealism.

Winners of the 2021 World Nature Photography Awards — www.theatlantic.com

The entries in this year’s World Nature Photography Awards have been judged, and the winning images and photographers have just been announced. Amos Nachoum was awarded the grand prize for his image of a leopard seal hunting a penguin.

Why read Boethius today? — aeon.co

For nearly a millennium, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius was a bestseller throughout Europe.

End Papers

Nuts and Bolts

Each week, the newsletter automatically goes out to all of you who have subscribed.

Except some of you have told me that you aren't receiving it. Thank you for letting me know. Inevitably when I suggest that you look in your spam folder, there it is. Those of you who have subscribed via Gmail will probably find all the missing issues are there (and whoever checks their spam mail?).

I reached out to Revue to see what the problem might be. Ashton got back to me and said that it often happens with Gmail, although they are constantly trying to make sure that doesn't happen.

He suggested that you flag the newsletter as Priority to prevent it from happening again. Whichever email client you are using, please look in your spam folder and safelist it so it turns up when and where you expect it should.

And if you're not receiving it anyway, please let me know.

Good Buggers

I confess to being a news junkie. Most mornings, after karakia, I will sit down and see what is happening in the world. Unfortunately, it's not an easy road to finding objective news outlets. Everybody seems to have an angle, and opinion is often/usually framed as fact.

I also confessed to having something of an addiction to Twitter. However, using Twitter requires a strong stomach and considerable self-belief. It seems to be a happy place for the wokerati and virtue signallers.

However, every so often, I read something that gives me joy and hope, reminding me that human beings are generally good people trying to do the best they can with what they have.

Yesterday I read a story about a genuinely good bugger who did something extraordinary. He pulled up at a gas station in Whangarei to fill up his Colorado ute. He told the story of a young woman in front of him at the pump with three children in her car who burst into tears when she saw the minimum spend was ten dollars.

Can you imagine that?

So Craig told her to fill up her gas tank and that the bill was on him.

Imagine if we all did that?

Now that is genuine kindness.

With the price of living rocketing up, not to mention fuel, there are plenty of people out there wondering how they're going to get through the next week and which bill is just going to have to wait.

And I'm as guilty as the next person of being so in my own space that I'm not aware that others are struggling far worse than me and that I can do something about it.

Some time ago, I was down at my local Four Square waiting for my turn in the queue at the checkout. In front of me was a man who was clearly at the bottom of the heap. He looked in his wallet, fiddled with his phone, and talked to the checkout operator about needing to go to the ATM to check his bank balance. I felt his embarrassment and shame.

I've got this, I said. I could afford it-just.

He blinked at me.

Isn't it strange how those with the least are the ones who give the most?

Enough.

E te whaanau, love, light and blessings to all of you.

Stay safe and stay positive.

Ka mihi nunui arohaa ki a koutou

Much love to you all