Stills from the Movie.

That's me as Steph.  Looking a bit upset.

Here is my contribution to the profession of acting for 2009:

Horses

HorsesNZ 2009. Director/Producer: Garrick Rigby. 15 mins
Horses was filmed in 2008 as part of the Screen Production honours programme at the University of Auckland. Horses explores issues of jealousy and domestic violence. What attracts people to each other and why do some individuals in abusive relationships go back for more?

The premiere will be on Friday the 17th of July at 6PM, SkyCity cinemas on Queen Street, please join me there to see the Homegrown series.  

Well it's half past 11 and... I'm wondering if it's Littlest member of the household who is 'disappearing' my working ruler...  That's the second one that's gone! absolutely no idea where... and it's a metre long and made of metal.  I can only assume that it's him, the same as blongs to the little voice that yelled at me an hour or so ago... Mum tractor in bed too! because he was sleeping on top of it because he wouldn't let it go when he went to bed.. or else the ghost of printing past, of course.  

  Roller skate lino city.  I'm thinking about pastellizing the blue for the first layer thinking the sky needs to be clean, but gold comes a close second because I don't want to make the foreground too cold.    That's how it goes that's how it goes..  

Lino 4!

It's a late night roller disco in the world of linoleum right here folks...  I have a dual colour print straight from the press ...

  But I have to admit I'm a little nervous about the colours... I might need a lighter second layer... but did I print enough the forst time round!!  

 (Irish accent - I am quite Irish you know) 

Chris Knox

  Full of thoughts about Chris Knox right now and how well loved he is.

  Here's a review of a gig I saw before Finn was born:

Today was the kind of day you drive along thinking today is as beautiful as you might hope a midwinter's day to get: the sky all blue and clear and the trees with a bit of yellow stuck in the tops, and you're really cruising along and then you look down and realize that you're Ooops over the speed limit.  This may depend on your personality type.  

   I had too much coffee today but we have output.  Check out the video on the blog two down and you'll see an extra starlet.  Our cat Cooper.

A Cameo DSH Feline, 1 year old who was tagged as a “staff favorite” at the SPCA, and has now become like a second child in our family.

                Cooper is quite an extraordinary cat, alert and feisty and quite kittenish… also very social, and quite talkative.

              He escaped from confinement after only a few days and came running out to meet me from a house at the other end of the block.   Two weeks later he was so adapted and so good about everything, we let him out to explore and he didn’t come back. 

            I thought we’d lost him, so after two days I made flyers, and put a website notice and rang the missing cat team…

            We had a number of phone calls.  Cooper had been playing with children three mornings in a row a few houses to the north, he’d been sighted in a tree up the hill, he’d been given a drink of milk across the road to the west and down a bit, and he’d been seen chased off by another cat further along….

            I delivered more flyers and called out to a man in a driveway quite randomly…  We’re looking for our lost cat..  “Oh he’s here” Cooper had gone in through another cat’s door, woken up the lady of the house in her bedroom, and then gone to the fridge making his requirements quite clear.

            I’ve been worried about my two-year-old’s behaviour it’s a steep learning curve because the cat is so exciting! and understanding of inflicting pain and so on still new…  (We suffer ourselves too).  …  That’s enough we say…  be Gentle! That Hurts him, Don’t even think about it, and we intervene and give time out for one minute if the behaviour is bad attention-seeking or dangerous.    Cooper however, follows him, huddles and jumps at his leg spanning two metres low to the ground…  he wrestles and play bites and play kicks without using his teeth or claws..   It’s hilarious.  Now we have to give them both time out to be fair.

            He’s a bigger cat now, and robust, and although he won’t hurt us it’s a shock to be headed off at the doorway by a flying square foot of kitten playing anything you can do…  Sometimes he jumps up and kicks off again from your chest in one swift manuovre.  When he’s outside he climbs trees in a nano-second. 

            To show us that he’s an initiated member of the clan, he’s started bring us his hunting trophies.  Birds would be a disaster, mice - we'd be not so upset, but having played chase the string games with him, (it’s one way to distance him from the baby, at least by a metre), it should be no surprise that he brings us slightly mauled earthworms,  large ones, and deposits them in the hallway where they make silvery paths across the wood in a slow bid for escape.

            Cooper snores like a trooper, competes with our son for comfy positions in front of the fire, waits by the letterbox when he expects us home, and is firm friends with my mother who lavishes attention on him when she visits.  In fact she ignores us and directs her attention to the ‘kids’.  Cooper sits himself in the middle of whatever is going on, (the keyboard, the paper or book, the kitchen bench), he’s simply curious.  At night he wonders why he’s not welcome to lie across my neck, and tries anyway, signaling his arrival with an affectionate bite on my nose. 

            It’s stressful, but the same applies with human babies, and we love him dearly.

 

 

This is where I preserve those little notifications from up the top

Epiphany:  I love synthetic ferrous oxide!  True!  It prints really well on the soft paper. and it just goes on and on, and it's really smooth and definitive.

  ah...   getting there.

  Tell you what else I love this time of year: a fire and a hot bath.  So, I Immortalize...

Matariki Star star star star star star star

Y am I going to Grey Lynn primary?  To relive my early youth... I did dream once that I was back at high school,(quite scary... ) as an older student, ie: 35 years old resitting bursary..  ever had that dream? 

  No I'm going to record morning assembly singing my new song Star star star star star.  Which also happens to be the name of the book I'm doing these prints for.  

  My young neighbours who happen to be stars have already done an amazing rendition of the song for me out on our street, which is a street in Grey Lynn that means star. Happily luckily.   Then guess what I suppose I should post it up here really so everyone can see it aye? 

  You can sing along...  it goes:

     Seven little stars

Star star star star star star star

High up in the sky

Each one like a little eye

I wonder what they see

Looking down on you and me

eight nine ten eleven,   

1  ,  2  ,  3  ,  4 ,   5 ,   6  ,  7   !!

  Excellent.  The kids were great.

 Thanks to all the great singers in Lucy and Nina and Oliver's classes, and especially thanks to Nina, Oliver, and Lucy!!  and their teachers and Liesel, their music teacher, and John who helped me and thanks to the Academy, and I'd like to thank my mum.  Now a little editing practice, and whoppa! We'll have our own Matariki music video.

Lino3

Yeah sure go ahead experiment... that's how you learn. But it's likely that you'll run into problems if your first layer isn't dry... with the ink coming off the image and causing the second layer not to sit properly. Be patient and wait for at least a week with oils, three weeks to be certain, and then you'll waste less paper ink and effort. I know this because I just went in and printed on a proof to test the design of my new cut.... blurggh! BUT! The design isn't so bad! Except I wish I'd printed different colours to start with instead of just yellow.

Lesson. Lesson is more.

It's early, it's not half past seven yet,and I'm getting ready to go in for the fourth day printing...

Quite proud of my work so far, but last night I was tired and made some fatal mistakes. With the second cut of my boypointingup picture I lost all sense of shading and now I'm afraid he'll look a bit strange.. I didn't think it would be so hard to imagine the colour arrangement.

Just entering the world of colour and realizing how vast it all is..

  What I'm interested i too is how poisinous it all is and is one colour more poisonous than the other or are they nothing to worry about compared to the grea amount of turpentine thats unavoidably everywhere...?

Happily I found a big round piece of glass in a falling down cupboard that we had to rebuild... It's hard to imagine that it was used for anything else. Maybe my house was inhabited by a printmaker in the past Could explain this unbending urge to cut -ink -roll -press that I have...

  And what happened to this phantom print-maker?

Lino 2.

No one has read this blog because I haven't told anyone about it.  No worries. 

 I'm here to upload images of my daily produce here in lino-land.  I did a mono print. Why..  ? there's that little question again.  It's got nothing to do with my book.  Ynot.

  What a day it's been.

  

Lino One!!

  I didn't remember that I loved lino until just recently.

  Suddenly I'm on a steep learning curve, and instead of hassling the arts forum with my entire proud progress I thought I'd post here.  

  Here are a few bits and pieces before I go and continue working..    

I'm on day 3 now of printing.  and I still have quite a lot of cutting to do!  

Less blogging would help probly, but I wanted to make a diary of this because I'm learning a lot as I go.

My printer is an old victorian book press, and I put an old fashioned linen nappy under the print to bestow a more even pressure.  Also I've just picked up a japanese style baren to smooth things over as I go.  What a great thing that is, we should all have one.

I'm dicovering that there are issues with the ink spread according to 

1. pressure... thus the nappy

2. application   ... I'm learning to roll on and not roll off again, when to clean and when to wipe

3. time... the length of time in the press is quite a specific thing too.

4. paper...   I did one print for too long with some thick hahn and the surface of the paper lifted  up. So now I have some thinner paper which is a lot easier to manage anyway in terms of ripping it to size .

5. ink...   well I'm only discovering there are greater worlds than I knew in those engaging little tubes.  I'm definitely going to read my "Ink my love Ink was my ruin"  poem for Montana day.

These prints are a series for a childrens' book that accompanies a display of lamps for the Matariki festival out at the Corban's estate in Henderson on June 26th.  The artists of the Lamps are Ronald Andreassand and Anita Glucina, and each of seven lamps will have a local writer's work with it.

Right now I'm pulling blue.  Soon I'm going to be pastelizing an opaque apricot I hope, for the cat.

Ok so I'm a bit slow with the old blog business.  To do upkeep on a blog means I need to organize weekly childcare even more, or perhaps get up at 4 each morning, to get an hour in...

    But I'm busy.  So I have to talk about it in a public diary format to make sure I am vital.  Oh why do you blog then?  

       What am I busy doing? Blogging.  No only joking..  right now I'm planning for some poetry gigs, making some poetry chapbooks and Talking about the collaborative work I put in with fellow artist Anita Glucina for the Metonymy exhibition.. that's the moon medallions I mean, prepping for a prop, what's new, this is a poetry doco, and rediscovering an ancient affection that I hold for linoleum.

        The medallions are available to be purchased, and I will tell you all about those soon.  Can I put pictures up on here what is this blog? Is it a good blog?  Is it it a blog blag.

        Poetry performance coming up with Nigel Gavin and Chris O if we can pin him down up at 121, early next month.  Then the next one after that is Lopdell house for Montana poetry day, with the Lopdell line up:   www.lopdell.org.nz/events/details/montana_poetry_day.html

        On the 26th June is the Matariki festival exhibition at the Corban's estate spot out at Henderson, and One of the seven lamps displayed by Ronald and the afore-mentioned Anita, has a poem and story associated with it by me...  Each lamp has a different poet's work, and I don't know who they all are but one is Miriam Barr.  Mine is a children's rhyme, and I'm making a book now to go with it, why?

       ...because I wanted to use my new book press  to make a book, but now I'm printing lino prints for each page.  Why?  Because I have to create stuff I enjoy it immensely I'm not acting or making films right now, and I've joined an amazing art community forum on line where I can learn a lot about how to work with pigments and so on, and because I fancy myself as an old fashioned craftsperson....    I know I could just grow strawberries and be a valid part community, well actually I'm doing that too.  Got your strawberries in for summer? See this is what happens when actors stop acting, they can't stop talking and they blog!

          Actually speaking of acting!   I did some a while back, on a short called Horses.  It will be screening in the homegrown series in the film festival, hang on link...

    

      www.nzff.co.nz/default.aspx?id=7516&region=2

More about homegrown:

  mic.org.nz/2009/05/homegrown-2009-programme/

Ahhhhh! the film festival!