SLANZA 10 year anniversary

My good friend Pauline McCowan has always kept in touch with me since our days on the Steering Committee for the School Library Association of New Zealand and when I'm in Auckland we usually meet. This time it just happened to be the SLANZA 10th anniversary and Pauline invited me to come along to the celebrations at the Stanley Street headquarters of National Library, Auckland. It was a happy occasion with speeches by Elizabeth and the past & present SLANZA presidents. Graeme Beattie captured the attention of the audience when he spoke about how he came to love books and his career.
It was great to catch up with Pauline and five others of the old crew... from left to right: Jill Stotter, me, Pamela Hulston, Liz Probert, Pauline and Elizabeth Jones.

Cultural Icons at Depot Artspace, Devonport

On the 3rd November, 2010 Alan was interviewed by Denys Trussell for the Depot's "Cultural Icons" series (see www.depotartspace.co.nz/). They have interviewed about three score artists/writers/musicians and others generally involved, over a long period of time, in the cultural life of New Zealand.
During the filming I was sitting in the sound engineer's room with Emma, Barry Brickell and the sound engineer for Depot Sound, Mark Howden. Barry was writing, Emma was checking up on things, I was borrowing Emma's Macbook to book tickets south and to catch up on a vast amount of work which happily I did during the two hour interview. Mark was browsing through the portrait book as he twiddled the knobs making necessary adjustments. Suddenly he said, "how come I've never heard of this artist? I did art history at university. This is some of the best painting I've ever seen".
How come indeed!

Rodney's response

MAGNIFICENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Al and Alan – the book is incredible! It confirms everything I knew about Alan 30 to 40 years ago, but the body of work exceeds anything I knew or could have anticipated. Alan is not just the greatest portraitist this country has known, but he is a stand out talent internationally. And the production quality, scope etc is tremendous. Well done Alan on a life incredibly well spent, and Al on achieving such a magnificent record. 

Rodney 

Dr T.L.Rodney Wilson  CNZM, former director Auckland War Memorial Museum, Auckland Art Gallery & Robert McDougall Art Gallery. www.rodney-wilson.com

The books have arrived

What a week, first the books arrived at Weyba Downs and now occupy a portion of Alan's working space. He shifted several storage boxes and paintings in order to accommodate them but at the rate that the books have been flying out  of the door (thanks to Isla) their occupation of his studio space will diminish rapidly.
And here, in Auckland I was driving along the traffic-clogged M1 into Auckland when my cellphone rang. It was the Import company saying that the truck transporting the books was at our storage space but was returning to base because there was no fork lift to unload the books. (Unlike the Qld carrier who manfully offloaded 1000 books, 2 boxes at a time - 30kg a pop). Kathie, the ever-helpful manager at National Mini Storage solved the problem and then found Hercules to haul them all upstairs and into their cages for me.
Denys Trussell pronounced the book beautiful; Paul Greenberg, our distributor, says Thames & Hudson would be proud of it; and Linda Spicer, patted it affectionately.
Books have been sent out for review and the invitations to the first book launch at Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 4th November at 5.30pm have been posted. phew...
more later ...

Alan Pearson: Expressionist Portraits

It's late Sunday afternoon, the weather is a lot warmer than it was this morning where working in the studio to get everything ready for the trip across the Tasman was a bit of a mission. I'm almost ready, the bag is yet to be packed, papers to be gathered together, a book to finish and library books returned ... you know the story, but here is the front cover of the book which will be delivered to us this week...

The journey begins...

It's just a few days now before I fly over to Auckland to meet the books as they arrive by sea, woohoo! It's the end of one part of the journey and the beginning of another. Over two years there's been much joy and also gnashing of teeth during the process of writing, photographing and assembling all the information needed to produce this 391 page book. Alan's cover looks great (see above and  http://www.alexandrastewart.co.nz ) he worked so hard on the design!
I want to thank Ann Gordon for suggesting this to me. Thanks to Isla also for her encouragement to get going... more later... love Al & Al