Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
This is my son wandering along the beach with a piece of driftwood he had picked up. As I was sketching it occured to me that if you squint your eyes at these houses on the dunes you can almost imagine what it looked like when I was kid and all the baches were basic fibrolite boxes.
In those days Pāpāmoa less than 1,000 people lived here, there were 3 dairys (small convenience stores), 1 of those stores had a petrol pump, and there was a wine shop. These days around 40,000 people call it home along with 2 shopping malls and 4 primary schools!
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