The Kingdom of Heaven is righteousness and Peace and Joy in the Holy Spirit. 1984-96
Acrylic on Hardboard 600mm high x 900mm wide (24" x 35 1/2")
I am looking fondly, reflectively, wistfully at my original paragraph for this painting
"One of the things I continue to love in the two decades I've lived here is the remoteness of my backyard. You still see more trees than houses in my sunny $12,000 estate sale miracle."
It's not all quite gone, but it's changed. My backyard is no longer remote. Where "The Trocks" blokey, hunky, sycamores lined up in their long tutusand danced, Henry has built two startlingly dull town-houses. Also on my skyline, Mary Potter Hospice have thinned out all the native bushes. I feel I'm looking at a Martian colony, all harsh synthetic glaring strip lights.
Down the side fence, the clothesline is still there. Washing blows around, up in Marilyn Monroe and the grating Mt. Victoria down-drafts.
1984. Theres snazzy lightness about sitting on the backdoor step with very sweet, very Nescafe condensed milk coffee in autumn sunlight. On the edge of my vision Henry's trees are in black shadow. Because my T shirt and blue socks are damp, a radiant corona of light ripples along the edges, over the white saggy dazzling space where a sheet hangs from a second line behind. I enjoy it obliterating greyish dull fence boards. Above the sheet, between my socks and T shirt, a neo-tropical shrub dribbles and spurts orange and raging scarlet trumpet flowers.
T shirts usually have logos on them - mine is an affirming quote from a letter Paul wrote to his friends. I like being told joy and peace rate equally with other stuff God likes. It's so difficult falling in love with my new friend Hattie, and trying to keep us in a place my Mum can't reach and wreck.
Something is missing. I repaint, prime out, and repaint several times, until the day I have two of McGregor's marigolds, brawny red gold, in a peanut butter jar against the frustrating bottom left hand corner.
I like this painting for the bottom final image in my Conceive sum-up page.
September 11, 2001, I'm dodging buses, running across Wellington's narrowest busiest street for Indonesian clove cigarettes for Nest - Is this a bad joke, a trick of the light? No! those "trick" Evening Post's are on the shelf where the Evening Post bundle is ...the surreal, unbelievable front page photo of the two New York skyline icons, milk carton style crumpling,
and gargoyley grey smoke lazily oozing
I wrote
"The World Trade Centre is all smashed. We can be expensively cheaply vengeful. Or ...