On the Road Again

At last I am nearly ready to take to the road. On Sunday I leave New Plymouth and on Monday I will be on the ferry crossing Cook Strait. I even got a discount because I am now a pensioner!

From now on I hope to be making postings more regularly. This 2 months back in New Plymouth has been a strange time. I have been very distracted and have barely picked up a camera. It is in such contrast to the previous 4 months when I was was in Invercargill and which turned out to be one of the most fruitful photographic periods of my life.

I ask myself what happened when I returned because it is important that I understand. Firstly I arrived back with a bad flu which seemed to carry on right into December, through all this I struggled to get together 31 prints that I needed for a show at the Southland Museum & Art Gallery, opening right at the beginning of January. This was not my choice of a date but I decided to go with it because it wanted to get that project behind me. These 31 were photos that I took while artist in residence there. I desperately wanted to go into the New Year without too much drag from unfinished projects.

I was also very busy with getting together my choice of 80 photos to use as the core of a book to be published in September. Orchestrating these was a big task but a very important one. No sooner was I getting on top of that than I developed a bad case of blood poisoning. I am still on antibiotics and they make me feel a bit strange in the head.

Another major task over this month has been making the switch from PC to Mac. In September I bought my first Mac, a 13 inch screened Macbook. Three weeks ago I bought a 24 inch iMac as well. I want to become a power user. In the past I have been operating my PC in rather a basic way and it has been costing me a lot of time not to say psychic wear and tear.

Every day I have been spending time learning how to operate a Mac. They are very different machines. There are marvelous online tutorials, some of them in video form.

I have an iPod as well and am now learning how to operate that in a way that gives me maximum benefit eg by downloading books for me to listen to when I am travelling which I'm mostly doing on my own.

So there we have it. Flu, show, book, Mac, blood poisoning. That will be some explanation as to why I've not been photographing or blogging. I've been rather weary as well, still had no holiday for a very long time.

There may be other reasons however. Invercargill is as far away from the art scene in New Zealand as is possible to get unless I travelled another 20 minutes and moved to Bluff. I think that this helped my work to be on the fringe. In many ways the art world is a distraction for me, certainly on many occasions an aggravation. It doesn't seem to a source of nourishment alas. I hope that this may change.