Welcome to the blog. On the this site you will find recent sketches right through to truely terrible sketches made on location over 20 years ago. Looking back at those sketches I sometimes wonder why I even continued with the practice! So why do I sketch? 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. Alon...
I stumbled on the Hawaiian waka hourua Hōkūleʻa in Auckland's Viaduct recently.
Hōkūle‘a changed forever the weird idea that Polynesians travelled the Pacific purely by chance. It's 1976 voyage – by traditional navigation – to Tahiti inspired a revival of waka building and traditional navigation education across the Pacific, including New Zealand where we now have something like 8 of the double hulled waka.
Hōkūleʻa is currently in the middle of a 70,000 km voyage around the Pacific that started in Alaska with sister waka Hikianalia.
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