In this Issue

1. Taku Mahi Toi o Te wiki-My Artwork of the Week

2. Korero Timatanga-Frontispiece

3. Photographer's Corner-Portraiture-On making a likeness

4. Waiata mou te Ata-Poem for the day

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

6. Koorero Whakamutunga-Endpapers

My Artwork of the Week

Taku Mahi Toi o Te Wiki

There is a lovely whakatauki ( Maaori proverb) which goes like this:

In other words, be discerning in what you seek to attain and choose a lofty goal. Do not think small.

However, sometimes looking up to the mountains, as the Symbolist painter Nicholas Roerich did, means you may miss the treasure at your feet.

Interestingly, the mountain to which the whakatauki refers (and very few ask which one) is Mt. Everest.

However, the world is contained in the magnificence of a single plant, or a seed, which has all it needs to grow into life. In its way, it sways to the rhythm of All That IS. Even the humble dock is to be marvelled at. It is an integral part of a greater whole. And when we look closely and deeply, much is to be learned.

The Arum Lily has been loved by artists from Georgia O’Keefe to Robert Mapplethorpe. Each responded to it in their way and, in doing so, revealed their inner world. The point here is that the plant simply IS. It allows us to bring our own beliefs and perception to it. It is impartial. We will see it each in our way and, in doing so, paint a portrait of our self and Self.

I leaned over the bridge crossing the Wairoa Stream on the edge of a busy thoroughfare. Behind me, cars slithered busily by. None of their drivers would I, suspect, have had any idea of the wonder unfolding below me on the stream’s edge.

Beneath me, on the riverbank, an explosion of arum lilies was jockeying for prime position by the water’s edge with a crop of very healthy docks. I think the docks were winning. They certainly didn’t seem cowed in any way and firmly maintained pole position.

I saw a small paragraph, perhaps a minor chapter in the vast, incomprehensible Book of Nature, or maybe a footnote about how evolution relies upon competition, even among plant species.

I see this image as massive, perhaps 40” x 60” (or even larger), printed on metallic paper and mounted on Dibond.

Edition of 1 only

$NZ 15 000 (print only).

Frontispiece

Koorero Timatanga

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning everybody,

There is something to be said for sunrise.

There is something to be said for waking up to the potential and possibility of a new day; I’ve looked out the window as the sun cracks open the eggshell of the night, and the yolk of the day begins to spill outwards.

There is something to be said for rising first thing, stepping outside into the semidarkness and acknowledging the wonder that we’ve actually made it to the front edge of a new day.

Most days, except when I sleep in (which isn’t very often at all), my way of greeting another opportunity ahead is to step outside into the chill of the predawn and offer a karakia whakawhetai(Ritual pet prayer of gratitude) to IO, the Supreme Being, and all those who dwell beneath and in him. Connecting yourself to a power greater than yourself and surrendering to the wonder of what is about to unfold is quite something.

Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Or appear to. Often we get tripped up, or we trip up ourselves, or Shit.Just.Happens. And yet, for all of this, we have risen to new possibilities and opportunities to do better and walk further.

Until we come to the end of our individual piece of string and our last day.

Where I’m living for the moment, dawn is a time of wonder. I’m surrounded by manu(birds). There are the skeins of geese and seabirds flowing across the graduated indigo blue of the morning; there is the kotare (kingfisher) which sits inscrutably, looking out into the rising light; there are the pukeko, squabbling and occasionally fornicating and of course, the ruru (native owl), which spends the predawn hour echoing and mocking the presumptuous braying of the rooster down the hill.

I have arrived at the beginning of the day.

I have arrived at the front edge of possibility. And I have arrived at the opportunity to weave new threads into the whariki (mat) of the day.

If you are reading this, then you have as well and as well.

Let us celebrate opportunity and possibility and the wonder of simply breathing.

And Being.

Photographer's Corner

Portraiture- On making a likeness

It has been said that all technologies arise in response to a perceived need. In the late 1820s, at a meeting of the Royal Society in London, somebody pointed out that a better method was needed to accurately document the world the Victorian explorers were discovering. Until then, people like Sir Joseph Banks had been recording the world they found, including its plants, with pen and ink. While the draughtsmanship was painstakingly accurate, it simply wasn’t quick enough. And there was a developing sense that for all the artist’s attempted accuracy, a precise likeness of the contents of the world being discovered wasn’t necessarily being documented.

Within 18 months to 2 years, the Daguerre brothers came up with their solution, based upon emulsions sensitised to mercury fumes. Needless to say, daguerreotypists literally and figuratively became a dying breed, and the process died out within two years. You may be interested to know that the principles of the daguerreotype form the basis of xerography.

The Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot came up with the first light-sensitive emulsion.

And then things took off.

For the first time in human history, it was possible to make an accurate likeness of a human being relatively simply and inexpensively. And that was no longer necessary to be wealthy and employ the services of a professional portrait painter. The new technology puts many of these mediocre artists out of work within a very short order.

Soon a number of entrepreneurs set up the first photographic studios. The people who stood behind the cameras were known as camera operators, for the title of photographer would come much later.

And no one talked about taking your portrait (20th-century) or even getting your portrait done. A camera operator would make your likeness, and the studio would then present it to you in the form of a small playing card-sized print. Daguerreotypes were usually made on sensitised copper plates.

Photography took off. While the purpose of its development was about documenting the world, there was money to be made photographing people. And portraiture was the commercial engine which drove the rapid technological advances in the medium. By the 1880s, the first commercial black-and-white silver-based emulsions were being offered for sale. The rest, they say, is history.

I think it is fair to say that most of us hate “having our picture taken”.When we see how we appear on camera, we are often disappointed.

And why is that?

I suspect it is because of a dissonance between how others see us and how we like to see ourselves. The camera may show us that we have double chins or are carrying a little excess weight, or indeed are not quite as visibly young as we would like to think we are.

And the canny photographers, the ones who make a solid living from portrait photography, are well aware of this, and their skill lies in mirroring back to the client their idealised sense of themselves rather than the honest light of reality. The successful studios know how to ennoble the sitter.

And why not? Is it dishonest? If the portrait makes the subject feel better about themselves, more confident and enabled, then that is not bad.

A decade or so ago, I was teaching a workshop on portraiture to camera club members. They were eager to pick up the cameras and make portraits. When they asked what time the professional models were arriving, I told them none were coming. They were to photograph each other because how can you make a likeness of another human being if you are not aware of your response to that?

I remember the deafening silence and looks of horror that fell across the room. I could see many of them were terrified. However, the discussion towards the end of the workshop was honest and revealing, as each opened up about how they felt having a camera pointed at them. As a side note, the great portrait photographer Imogen Cunningham was so terrified of what her clients would think of her efforts that she would never meet them. She always posted the finished work to them.

You see, here is the thing. However much we may try to avoid it, we never make a picture of another person or, indeed, of ourselves.

The picture documents the space between us, where each participant agrees to meet and collaborate.

And perhaps it is the awareness that in photographing someone else, we are also exposing ourselves that makes portrait photography a place many fear to tread and take refuge in the relative non-judgement of genres like landscape and still life.

Waiata Mou Te Ata-Poem For the Day

Writing poetry reminds me in some ways of dancing with fairies in some enchanted wood. You fall into the rhythm of the dance and go along with it, but all the while, you are aware of the capriciousness of some of the participants and the fact that they may choose to put out a foot and trip you up.

Words in a poem will find their way and often suggest side paths, and gaps between the trees in the forest which may be followed if the reader chooses, although there is every likelihood they will end up dead-ends. However, that is the fun of writing poetry, of deliberately allowing alternative possibilities.

Somewhere beyond that is the power of metaphor and allusion, of drawing reference to things some readers will instantly get while others may not.

And, often, the simplest of material and simple observations are all that is needed to find something to express.

Approach of Light Song

The sun has been coming

 up, over and through for hours now,

unwinding the nine-star threadbare quilt of the night,

teasing apart the copperplate stitching along the horizon.

It is prising open the purple-tattooed clamshell lips of the dark

Which has held the sky and land together in an eternal lovers’ embrace

(if only for one night and every night).

Now it rudely pushes its parents apart,

but by way of apology

slathers the rheumy balcony glass

with deepdipped brushstrokes of runny, running mascara condensation,

and hangs glinting necklaces

of translucent, glowing dewdrops from the winterbared branches of trees

upbraided, upraised and outstretched towards mourning.

And, satisfied with its efforts,

it heaves itself up over its cloudpillows

And bursts forth in radiant ruthless purpose from the gates of dawn

on its tracetrack gallop across

the sapphire dome of the overarching day.

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

EndPapers

Koorero Whakamutunga

In many ways, life can be likened to a river, and our lives are a one-way odyssey down the river.

We begin the journey as uri (seeds), cast down from the clouds and sewn into our Mother the Earth, our mother for our life journey.

Each seed weaves as a thread in a greater whole, and we become sentient, individuated beings. Falling on the mountaintops and mountainsides, we drift downwards until we amalgamate with the great river of life. From there, our passage is ever downwards until we reunite with the Great Ocean, becoming one with All That Is, and the cycle repeats itself.

We are therefore an idea travelling down the river, which constantly changes, but yet ever is—movement and non-movement as One.

Some of us will travel from Mountain to Ocean very swiftly, completing our journey in a short period of time. Others of us, buried deep in the currents, will take longer to follow our line.

All of us are song lines written by a Greater Hand or perhaps parts of a universal symphony. Each of us is a musical score, both unique and complete. Each of us is integral and necessary to the Great Symphony, and yet not so.

It has been said that Paradox is the Great Principle, the battery that powers the Universe, the ultimate law and that may indeed be so. It is not for us to know.

Whatever happens to the River, it will always continue to flow with or without us.

It simply IS.

However, we are gifted with choice. We are permitted to make our own choices.

Will we dwell upon our small awareness our see ourselves as part of something much more significant?

Will we be a waterdrop in the River or a conscious, contributing part of the river itself?

I wish you all love, truth, wisdom and peace.

As always, walk gently upon our Mother and be kind to each other.
He mihi arohaa nunui ki a koutou katoa

Much love to you all,

Tony.