NUMBER OF MAN Print

I was born and raised in rural New Zealand, and operated the family farm for a number of years. I have always had a creative talent, in both food and art and I did a short course with at the Whitecliffe School of Arts, Auckland, New Zealand in the early 1980’s. More recently, my wife encouraged me to train as a chef; however due to circumstances beyond my control I am unable to do paid employment. Thus with encouragement from my wife I turned my creativity to art. My art is on the whole self-taught and I tend to paint both abstract and coastal landscapes. I am influenced by the geometry of nature and a number of the great artists; namely, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. I see and feel something new every time I look at or start a new work. Like my talents when it comes to food, God has given me the ability to my amazement to get the colours just right. While some of the components of my art methodology may have come from watching others on YouTube, I have attempted to create a style that is uniquely my own. When starting a new work the most important to me is that the painting has to come from the heart not from my head. If I try to paint from my head the painting turns out to be a bunch of colours that mean nothing to me, therefore means nothing to others. In an abstract or perhaps a surreal way a lot of my paintings come out of real things and feelings , like life itself my painting tend to be fluid because life is fluid When you are viewing one of my paintings, I try to express the feeling of movement in the three-dimensional space from a two-dimensional object, as you walk around the room and view the painting from different angles the perspective changes creating a three-dimensional space. This causes a feeling of movement in the work, so that every time you view it you see something you’d have not seen before.