Dead Man’s String in Clutha

Acrylic on board, 60 x 45 cm, Artist’s Collection

This is a painting about my favorite place in Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand)— Central Otago and the Clutha River. One of the artists I loved as a child was Rita Angus, one of New Zealand’s leading 20th-century painters of portraits and landscapes. I tried to paint this in her style. The beautiful shirt is from a 1900s photograph of a Sinti woman (the Sinti are the Romani of Central and Eastern Europe). Like Frida Kahlo’s famous painting of her Mexican dress suspended in an incongruous American setting, this shirt hangs in the middle of a strange landscape—interesting, complex, but ultimately foreign.