2012 art and bumble bees

Here is to the bees  and what was a good year artwise. To celebrate the end of 2012 I ‘ve made a video about bumble bees.The year started off with my Lochmara Lodge artist’s residency where I painted birds and sweated over my project Where the home is : the Christchurch Earthquakes which showed at the Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, the Aigantigne Gallery, Timaru and PaperGraphica in Christchurch. It was accompanied thanks to Mike Coker with a limited edition, high end, digital publication which is is into its second reprint of 50 and got a plug in the Listeners Take five. A few copies are still available if you have missed out so check my shop.

Another highlight was my show Seventies Silver at the Mark Hutchins Gallery in Wellington where pink nude in blue pool sold for what was a record price for a Jane Zusters photograph and the Auckland Art Gallery acquired Portrait of a woman marrying herself , my 70’s feminist image made on a $2.50 plastic Dana camera.Katy Corner in Art News Spring 2012, page 50, said the show “was a beauty, featuring vintage photographs of a quality almost impossible to match in these digital days’.

I was headhunted by Pat Deavoll of the New Zealand Alpine Society to tutor two painting workshops at the Unwin Hut, Aoraki and by way of  demo painted my first plein air landscape.It was heady stuff hanging out with those mountaineers turned landscape painters.