Kaikoura Up-grade
It's 1976. We're piled back into the Picton
express with all our cups of coffee. It's been
raining all day, and the snow is down. I'm
trying to stop coffee spilling all over me
and memorise this line of railwaymen's
houses lighting up for the night. So friendly
and cheerfully I've dropped my customary
cynicism about all humen life stopping till
after The Box shuts down for the night. I
did one of the first paintings I ever sold.
I miss not being fit enough to jump on a
long distance train, and look. I miss my
painting. I'm looking for a photo of it, and
doing two paintings of it. The other one is
a close-up of one house, and Shirley is doing
a zoom lens sum up — Mum has just mashed the
potatoes, carrots and swede, and he has to
go inside, in the middle of fixing his old
radio.
"There's a van in the other corner, with one
wheel off, up on blocks" and that's the wattle
tree I remember on the hill behind Mum's. Its
unhesitating sunniness in the grimness of
early spring. Until the farmer chops it down.
1990 acrylic on hardboard 600 x 900mm