On Saturday I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of Graham Fletcher's new body of paintings called 'Lounge Room Tribalism'. The sampling of Graham's work featured here is the culmination of four years study towards a Doctorate of Fine Art at Auckland University's School of Fine Arts.
A good painting in my view is one that hits you in waves. In the case of these beauties the first wave is delivered by the vibrant colour scheme, the second is the nostalgic familiarity of the 1950s interiors, but after that it's the disconcerting spatial arrangement of the compositions, the signs of human habitation (a pipe on a table, a pot on the stove, a record on a sofa), the peculiarly animistical character of the indoor and outdoor plants, and of course the sentinel like presence of the 'tribal' artefacts occupying each room.
The paintings were inspired in part by Graham's research of the extensive collections of carvings and objects owned by surrealist artists such as Andre Breton and Max Ernst who were captivated by the mystical and supernatural properties of such artefacts and attempted to incorporate these qualities into their own work. The inspiration for the paintings also came from Graham's visits to the homes of a number of prominent figures in the New Zealand art scene where he observed the manner in which culturally specific objects and artefacts were incorporated into the stylish decorative schema of their living spaces, and yet they seemed dislocated and lost, their power somehow diminished by having been removed from their original context and country of origin.
Anyway, as there won't be a public exhibition of the paintings, which are now under examination, I thought it was important to post a few of them here and to congratulate Graham on a fantastic achievement.
The circularity of life is an amazing thing. A couple of days ago we received a gift from Emma Smith and Michael Steven - a thesis completion, Christmas and New Years present in one. The gift was a collection of poems by Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003) called Imogen. I have been looking for a copy of this elusive book for 17 years, not only because it is a beautiful example of Alan Loney's Hawk Press design, but because this book represents the beginning of my writing life. 
In light of my own experience I felt that I was somehow meant to choose this poem. Through the process of writing about it I learned how Joanna channelled her grief into art in order to understand the nature of loss. The work of painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) furnished her with the vocabulary she needed and the poem speaks of the quiet simplicity of Morandi's still-life compositions, where groups of objects part the background space. Joanna's poem is the textual equivalent of a Morandi painting with the composition of her words and phrases expressing ideas about presence and absence, and revealing that creativity itself can fill the vacuum of loss and sorrow. 
This first piece of writing started me on a long journey of study that led to an MA thesis on femininity and maternity in Gretchen Albrecht's shaped abstract paintings and finally to a five year investigation of the psychology of pretended parenthood in relation to Rita Angus's imaginary daughter Rutu. Now that I've arrived at the end point I can see that my motivation has always been about understanding the condition of childlessness and the realisation that motherhood and maternity should not only be considered in terms of flesh and blood offspring, but can be expanded to include creativity in a much broader sense.
