Kokonga
1992 Acrylic on Hardboard 400mm high x 600mm wide (16" x 24")
You must know and love Central Otago to understand the green in Chris Chapman's little postcard photo on display at Zoe's.
I study two postcard sized photos intently. The one by my photographer friend, Chris Chapman,of the jolting harsh green of the one irrigated paddock beside the Taieri River, on the train ride to Cromwell. Behind are the baked brown ginger fruit loaf ups and downs of the Kakanui Range. Schist rock thrusts through the eroded gaunt skylines.
The other photo is a woefully ordinary one in, black and white in a train magazine of a diesel train emerging from a cutting that curves out of sight on the right. I like that cutting. It's about all lazy contented train journeys. We should have "posed" the last two day photographer's train ride I went on, here...
Not to worry, I can fix it all up in a painting, with a cheeky little steam engine, maybe a twin of Ian Welch's (from Mainline Steam ) restored Ab 663 surging into the gravel road crossing. I'm leaning out of the cab. Except that I've run out of space, there should be the two or three boy's train-set bright red streamlined carriages of the Cromwell Express trailing along...
I'll do another painting, on a bigger sized sheet of hardboard. I want to explore exactly how the river bank space works. The green of the front paddock must be flatter, harsher. All the leaves are off the willows in the little beige band at the bottom of the Old Man and The Old Woman Range. Adding fire engine red hots them up, I haven't given the sky a gold undercoat to make it luminous and transparent, just plastering the blue on, around the skyline outlines is so cold. The high up cold there is even in summer, where it's about to snow.
I see Kokonga 2, continues to delight Prime Ministerial hearts, in Sally Hanna's last statement of her business, Rent a picture. Before that, in the middle of 1990 Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson's, rigorous purging of all useless contemporary art from The Beehive, I saw that Annabel Taylor, who began the business, had charmed Jim Bolger (ex Prime Minister) into a little modest renting of Kokonga 2
I like the engine in Kokonga 1 better, and its environment in 2 more!
Kokonga 2 is a diptych, Acrylic on hardboard, 600mm high x 1200mm wide