Studio Insights - August 2025
CREATE: What I’ve created/done & what I’m working on.
INSPIRE: What art has inspired me.
LEARN: What I’m learning to develop my practice.
PLAN: What I’m planning next.
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”
At the time of writing this entry, it’s closer to the end of September than August… so this is really just looking back and trying to remember what I did last month! I still enjoy having these summaries of each month to look back through, though, so the show shall go on regardless of my horrific tardiness. There was little variance to talk about anyway - I spent most of my time sitting in front of the main large painting for my upcoming exhibition.
Table of Contents:
CREATE: Hero Painting
INSPIRE: Academy Visual Art Prize
LEARN: Takina’s Wasteful Practice
PLAN: Exhibition Design
CREATE: Hero Painting
This month, I suited up for a battle to the death against the ‘hero’ painting for my exhibition. I plonked myself in my chair in front of this ambitiously complex 80 x 130cm canvas and performed one of three activities:
An intense staring match
Questioning my life choices
Actually applying paint to canvas
While it’s not the largest piece I’ve ever created (Ethereal Moss is 100 x 150cm), it has been by far the most challenging. It combines a multitude of photo elements, lighting changes, surreal aspects, and warping/perspective effects throughout. There's a heap more guesswork, thinking, and figuring things out rather than just ‘recreating’ what I see in a photo reference. I also found it extra daunting because I haven’t worked on big pieces in a while, so I was really out of practice in that regard.
I’ve been super quiet on Instagram, leaving this piece a secret. But I still wanted to share a few exclusive progress shots on here for my amazing mailing list readers :)
I didn’t quite finish it this month, so you’ll have to tune in to my summary next week to see if I managed to emerge from this battle victorious.
INSPIRE: Academy Visual Art Prize
With all the staring at my painting going on, I didn’t manage to find the time to stare at much other art. Fortunately, this exhibition I went to had hundreds of art pieces to look at, so I got my fix for the month. Held at Takina, this massive display had a wide range of styles and (unfortunately) quality. There was a lot of great work on display, but at the same a number of pieces that in my opinion weren’t great. As usual with these kinds of awards, I found myself baffled by some of the award choices… but maybe I’m just quite close-minded?
Regardless, I had a great time exploring around and found some real gems. It was amazing to see smaller artists featured at the beautiful Takina venue, which has so far been very high production exhibitions.
Most curious was the oddly familiar feel and layout, which gave me Déjà vu from the previous Disney exhibition… more on that in the learn section
LEARN: Takina’s Wasteful Practice
Kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for my learn section this month, but I wanted to discuss what I discovered from a conversation about the behind-the-scenes of Wellington’s newest convention center, Takina.
As I said, the Academy Visual Art Prize layout felt very familiar - because it was using the exact same wall layout from the previous Disney exhibition, including all the different wall colours! Although it was certainly a bit strange in places with all the different coloured walls, I quite enjoyed seeing how a different exhibition used the same layout in a different context. After talking with the exhibition organiser, he explained they were quoted $30k to repaint them white, so they decided to just leave it as is. A bit ridiculous, but not too surprising given the amount of wall space. What really shocked me, however, was learning that their standard practice for each exhibition is to tear down all the walls and send them to the landfill! I had just assumed they had moveable walls, or some sort of modular system.
Now I don’t know much about the logistics of large exhibitions, maybe this is really just standard practice. But that seems excessively wasteful to me. No wonder the exhibitions at Takina are so expensive, and it’s still struggling. A real shame for Wellington’s creative scene. Big thumbs up to the Academy for reducing waste and working with the existing walls, thumbs down to Takina for their wasteful practices.
PLAN: Exhibition Design
September will be about switching to the design and prep stage of my exhibition once completing my battle with the large painting. I’m excited to be working with a couple of awesome creatives to make a branding design/poster that brings everything together.