Although conventional wisdom holds that New Lynn is Auckland’s ‘gateway to the west’, I have always found the border to be more appropriately marked by the weird subaquatic sentinels that sprout up from the roundabout on Titirangi Road.
A friend said this to me recently, and I still don't know exactly how to respond. To rebuff is not an option - generally, that statement is followed by "I don't understand it". Fair enough.
At the beginning of 2015 I posted a blog saying that I intended to write more about the art that I saw. It didn't have to be for a journal and the artist didn't need to commission me to do it - I just wanted to write more because I enjoy looking and writing.
When William Morris famously counselled "have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful", he was seeking a golden rule not for interior decoration, but for life. Who could possibly argue?
A couple of hundred years ago, the confidence to paint what was seen but unseen garnered ridicule for the Impressionists and Expressionists. With time, viewers began to understand that these artists were not seeing things as they were on the surface; they were seeing more than what was on the surface. Like Giotto and Duccio, who discovered if they applied paint to canvas in a certain order it made things look three-dimensional, the Impressionists realised that water was not a solid blue surface and the Expressionists realised that sometimes you are so morose, everything turns blue.