Melrose Road
1975 acrylic on hardboard 600 x 900 mm
My offer on the house I still live in has been accepted. I'm moving out of my railway carriage styled basement flat in Island Bay. I'm filling up a good-bye sketch block about things I will always treasure.
I love sitting on the scratchy oak toilet seat - its the best place to look at paintings I'm working on. The top part of me is reflected in the mirror at the end of the passage way. Behind my reflected head and chest is my only oil painting hanging above the cistern. This shows two hills in Centro Otago's Dunstan Ranges with the empty spaciousness of the landscape below.
My big yellow parka drying, hanging in front of me, is not a reflection, so close it nearly touches the top of my knees and I'm enjoying the soft blue toilet tissue to my left!
In the bottom right hand corner, propped up against the side of the bathroom doorway, you see the cab of the red diesel shunter at Alexandra - and above its roof, the schist rock snow covered bumpy top of the Cairnmuir Range.
The "sound track" of the painting is Hone's boilermaker of a new poem -
Exulting men
skilled as spiders thread
a skyline of
steel crucifixes
Here is my original witing for this painting...
In the bottom right hand corner of
this painting you can see the blazing
big yellow hill, behind the Alexandra
yard shunter, on my way out from the
camping ground. They’ve just bulldozed
the living, changing, challenging orchard
heart up front out. For a laundromat...
Can you hear Hone read — Exulting men
skilled as spiders’ thread
a skyline of steel crucifixes?
Who put the oak seat in this severe ’60s
shed? The one touch of indulgent pleasure
I miss when I buy my place. Cairnmuirs
behind me. Reflected.