Suburban Houses
I started painting pictures of suburban houses similar to this one about 25 years ago. The first ones were based on old black and white family photographs of houses we had lived in New Zealand. My father was a builder and Mum used to design them. We would shift to a new house every 2 or 3 years.
I paint them partly as a reflection on family history and partly because I like painting landscapes and this gave me a convenient excuse to do so.
The picture is called organism because a house and the people living in it have a distinct existence as a separate organism. The spaces in and around a house become charged with the movements and psychological activities of the people living in them.
Ancestral Shrine refers to the spiritual significance that certain houses or locations can assume in a person’s memory and dreams. They can serve as a substitute for a tribal homeland for people who no longer have access to such things.
It is also a metaphysical portrait of my father, because he built the house and painted it, and his tools and building equipment are in the yard (The trailer, the piece of wooden scaffolding and the electric planer covered with a piece of corrugated iron.) He also mowed the lawn.
I have fond memories of growing up in the outer suburbs of Auckland and I would hope these paintings reflect some of the eerie serenity of the old photographs that capture these memories.
The miniatures are painted in acrylic paint on little pieces of masonite. They are bases on photographs taken from moving cars, some are copied from real estate magazines and some were done on the spot. I like painting miniatures because you can finish a picture relatively quickly and it is also a reaction against the modern tendency towards very large paintings. The implication being that unless it’s enormous, it’s not very good.
A small picture can quietly and politely insinuate itself into your mind whereas a very large picture explodes in your face and stains your clothes with its colours, completely dominating your fragile existence.
Tags: Suburban Houses text Reg Mombassa
A Commemorative Tone Poem of Surprising Delicacy
When young men go out at night
their veins are a plump chord
binding a shimmering chest,
steely spider nets containing the kilogrammatic heads
that burst from their shirts.
They have trout eyes that glow in the dark
like saucers of boiling fat,
soaking up the night beetles and specking the walls
with flecks of steaming lard.
Outside the clubs warm bowls of sound are placed
to entice these preening great-headed Toms.
Lurching through the reeling doors
they check their minds with the cloak room girl
to pick them up when they leave
in stale paper bags
slightly damp from leaking brain.
They are the sex-magnet men
and naked in their suits they come
filings to the steel they shiver and howl
to the rattle of the loud wet music.
It’s a funny world when you’ve got your head on wrong-
the fruit and clatter of life recede
as you bounce off the walls of the rage-cage
your ears electric shells tuned to receive
some hint of lust that could lead
to a bruised and musty coupling
in some sticky fortress of love.
At the crest of their nights
they are snapping dogs at a children’s party
eager to snatch the minds of adolescent girls
and dash them from their bony cupboards
and quite prepared to catch half-bricks
in their quick mouths.
They wake pricked and pickled
on bleak and featherless mornings
wounded birds at the road
distended organs shovelling out
a brittle cylinder of cellophane skin.
All that remains is to order the starry spume
of their infinite celestial nights
reducing these memories
to a commemorative tone poem of surprising delicacy.