Winter News

This month there is a good cause brewing in the form of BraveArt. BraveArt aims to raise funds for the CanSurvive dragon boat team to send them to Florida to compete. Every member of the CanSurvive team is a breast cancer survivor, and they, along with some selected well-known Kiwis, have had plaster casts made of their torsos, so that they can be turned into art works and auctioned off.

I was invited to take part and figured that it would be a good challenge to try a surface other than canvas, and at the same time contribute to a good cause. I was duly delivered a white plaster cast taken from Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown. For my painting I decided to render some white lilies against a black background, using the three dimensional form of the torso where I could to emphasise the form of the lilies as they curve and roll. I also brought the mayoral chains into the picture, winding them around the torso. With the real Wellington mayoral chains, each link has the initials of a previous mayor of Wellington, going all the way back to the 19th Century. For my picture, I decided to replace the mayors’ initials with the initials of the CanSurvive team members. This makes the team members themselves an unbroken chain – individual links that join with each other and give one-another strength.

The BraveArt torsos will be auctioned on 21 August at the NZ Academy of Fine Arts gallery in Wellington. For more info visit the website at www.braveartnz.com.

 

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