Rotorua, New Zealand
Aroha Pelham‑Tane
Paddock Studies
Aroha painted the same hillside every morning for twelve weeks, in thin oils, on cardboard.
The same hillside every morning, and it never once looked the same.
Aroha Pelham‑Tane
The summer
Aroha Pelham‑Tane lived opposite a hillside she had stopped looking at. It was a plain paddock outside Rotorua, with one fence line and a crooked macrocarpa, and she suspected she knew it less well than she thought. She decided to paint it every morning for the length of the fellowship.
She painted from 6 am until the light changed, usually about ninety minutes. She used thin oils on squares of cardboard cut from delivery boxes, so that no single painting felt precious. She made eighty-one small paintings and ruled out only a handful.
Her mentor suggested she hang them in a grid by date, so the weather could be read from left to right. In week ten she did, on her barn wall, and a neighbour walked over to ask what the grey week was. It had been five days of mist in the third week, when the hill nearly vanished and she painted little more than a smudge and the fence.
The mornings were not all easy. Twice she woke to heavy rain and stood in the barn doorway painting under the roof edge, and once she lost a day to a flat tyre and made up for it with two paintings the next morning. Her mentor told her the skipped day was worth leaving blank on the wall, and she agreed.
She kept her own notes on each morning, and these now run alongside the paintings. Paddock Studies hangs as a single grid of eighty-one panels, and it can be seen on the fellows page. The original wall in the barn is still up.
