"Black Sands" depicts one of our famous west coast
beaches, Karekare, which means "rough sea" in Maori, and is located just
south of Piha not far from Auckland city. As with much of my work, I
used photographic reference, and I took the shot for this study at
around six o'clock in the evening in late May. There are no roads to the
beach at Karekare and you get there by foot through the sand dunes,
which lends an extra quality of solitude to its rugged expansiveness. I
knew at the time that this place with its brooding clouds, black sands
and scintillating sunset over the rough surf would make an excellent
painting.
Detail featuring a solitary gull skimming over the
shallows.
Built up slowly with many thin glazes over the underpinning colours to
create a quality of glowing translucence, the work took around three
hundred hours to complete.
The two words that feature in people's response to this painting are
"stunning" and "gorgeous". It does the morale wonders to know you have
accomplished what was intended.
"Black Sands" is thematically a complementary painting to
the recent "Whangapoua Dawn" which features white sands at dawn on the east
coast of the Coromandel. As with "Whangapoua Dawn" it has been released as a
limited edition of one hundred signed giclée* prints on canvas.
This new type of printing we are using is outstanding for quality and shelf
life with the added bonus of being able to print on canvas. The
combination of pigment based inks and a protective coat of varnish give each
print a lab tested life, under normal indoor conditions, of over a
hundred years without fade.
As I use practically no texture (thick paint) in my painting technique,
these new giclée prints are virtually indistinguishable from the original.
* Giclée is a French word, pronounced "zhee-clay", meaning spurted or
squirted, and is a term used to distinguish the technology from regular
ink-jet printing. It is the Rolls Royce of fine art printing using a large
format printer and pigment based inks.
The framing for this piece is in a beautiful soft satin black timber with a
very classy pewter insert reflecting both the tones of the painting and
surroundings.
Price framed: $1,500 including delivery in New Zealand.
Price unframed: $1,300 including delivery in New Zealand
(laminated with archival glue to a rigid backing board, ready for framing)
