90 x 60 cm / Oil / Canvas
I finished this painting in late 2023, during the months I spent driving around New Zealand in my car. Between September 2023 and April 2024, that car was my home, my studio, my shelter. I painted this inside it — the canvas propped against the dashboard or folded seats, my palette balanced on whatever surface I could find.
A bottle of cola, a roll of toilet paper for cleaning brushes, brushes scattered on the passenger seat. It was not easy. But constraint forces you to see more clearly.
The view is from Bennett’s Bluff Lookout, high above Lake Wakatipu near Glenorchy — a place I had tried to paint three or four times before, and failed. Each time, I could capture the distance: the far mountains receding into the haze, the lake stretching out toward the horizon.
But I could never capture the height. The feeling of standing on that cliff edge, with the ground falling away beneath you. Something was always missing.
This time, I found the answer in the dark slope — that steep, shadowed hillside on the right, plunging sharply down to the water’s edge. That dark mass, right in front of where I was standing, became the anchor. It tells the viewer: this is how far you have to fall. And then I added two birds, small and dark, flying low on the left side of the lake. They are not decoration. They are scale. They tell you how high up you are — because you are looking down on them.
The foreground is full of the wild plants of that hillside — tussock grass in gold, lupins rising like blue candles, a lone tree catching the light, and pale yellow-white toetoe softening the edge. They are the ground beneath your feet, the last thing holding you before the drop.
The lake itself is a pale blue-grey, calm and almost still, stretching toward layers of mountains that dissolve into the distance — some still bearing snow, others fading into the atmosphere. And above it all, the sky: horizontal bands of heavy cloud, slate and iron-blue, with a sliver of warm light breaking through near the horizon. The storm is coming. You can feel it building.
I called this painting “Eye of the Storm.” Because that day, where I stood was perfectly still — no wind, no noise, just the lake and the silence. But when I looked up, the sky was already turning. The world beyond that quiet place was already moving toward chaos.
And I thought: that is the lesson I want to carry with me.
Stay calm. No matter how stormy it gets out there.
This painting is especially meaningful to me — not just because of when I painted it, but because I finally solved the problem I had set myself. I painted the height. I painted the distance. And I learned something that season on the road: that you can stand inside the chaos and still find stillness. That the eye of the storm is not a place — it is a choice.
