Michael Hight

a.k.a. 'the beehive painter'

Some works from his recent show 'Crossing the Line' 

The 2012 exhibition The Dreams of Children signalled a shift in Michael Hight’s painting practice. The black paintings had a dramatic and nocturnal quality which is extended in Crossing the Line as the new works continue Hight’s fascination with memory, archives, encyclopaedias and the surprising relations between things. Each work is like a theatrical tableau placed upon a shelf against a black backdrop for the viewer to behold. A handful of elements are juxtaposed to produce multiple effects—luminous paintwork, autobiographical threads, historical narratives, psychological judders, allegory, metaphor and so on. In contrast to Hight’s beehive paintings, these works feature landscape on a reduced scale. It is partitioned off and rattles against the things and people placed in the scene. At times, the paintings generate a sense of unease, the macabre, the unfamiliar, a visual puzzle. At other times, the effect is nostalgic, moving, deeply familiar.The exhibition, Crossing the Line, takes its title from the ceremonies ships engaged in when they crossed the Equator in the 1880s. This ceremony is featured in the exhibition’s largest painting of the same title.

Micheal Hight is a self-taught painter who has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1980s. He has a Bachelor of Social Science and undertook extensive travel through North America, Europe and North Africa in the eighties. He is most commonly associated with his realistic depictions of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, particularly in Central Otago and Canterbury.
More recent works have temporarily left behind his identifiable landscapes in favour of surreal dreamscapes within which a personal sense of real childhood innocence is evident. His use of juxtaposition, ambiguous symbols and an overwhelming sense of the dark and mysterious, together create an uncertainty in these works that is as curiously haunting as it is beautiful.

Biosecurity notes

Some images and notes to accompany the customs scans.

The fruits and vegetables wouldn't go through the scanner separately, as the container was too light and would get caught in the rubber curtain, so we had to weigh it down somehow. The result (cropped from all the other images)...

The scanners pick up on moisture / density, so with the cos lettuce and the slightly dried-up edamame beans I scanned, there was very little for it to find, and they appeared almost invisible. I also learned how the different colours are detected and what each represents. The colours are orange, green and blue. Blue is hard materials such as metals, batteries, wires and hard plastics.  Green is for medium-density materials like most plastics, and sometimes ceramics and bone. What shows up in orange is organic matter - biological material, anything that is 'natural'. Paper, cotton clothes, leather, etc. 

'So we can straightaway see the gun, which is bright blue, but not necessarily the things which we're actually looking out for, which are potentially much more dangerous - like fruit, and nuts and seeds...'

When customs officers are being trained to use these scanners, they can't rely on colour, since pretty much everything is orange, and your biosecurity risks are the same colour as your cotton socks. They have to learn to look carefully for certain shapes. And they kindly sent me a document with real-life images of sneaky produce.

The woman who was helping me was on the same wavelength in a lot of respects. She was passionate about animal welfare, fresh organic produce, and biosecurity. She told me that the infamous fruit fly came through customs undeclared in someone's luggage. When I asked how she was sure that it was introduced that way - through the airport - when so many thousands of fruits and veg are imported for sale, she told me about the sprays they use on all imported produce to kill off potentially dangerous insects and bacteria. Even 'organic' fruits and vegetables, although they might have been organically grown, will have been doused in (toxic) chemicals if they've crossed the border. That's why it's important to buy local as much as possible.

Coincidentally she also used to work for MAF, as a handler for the airport's sniffer dogs. Our family used to raise these beagles for a year at a time, before they are sent to work at the airport, and it just happened that she'd worked with Utah, one of the breeder dogs we'd looked after!

The machine and conveyor belt, in progress. While we were scanning, one of the customs officers came across to scan some mail and found some sneaky pills in one envelope! True story.

Because the international mail centre is a strictly bio-controlled area, I had to throw out all of the fruits and veges into one of their bins to be destroyed afterwards. I'd been warned that this was the case, but it was still totally devastating. Food waste makes me so sad!! Especially when it's this nutrient rich and colourful, not to mention expensive all up. Not sure that it was worth it, either, considering the image quality. Oh well. Rest in peace.

Biosecurity

Following on from my x-rays of fruit and veg last week. While getting in touch with various radiology clinics, I also sent a few emails to various branches of customs security, the airport and the MPI, with a similar request - to see if I could use their scanners.

Yesterday, Monday 4 May, I went out to the airport. The international mail centre next door is where all incoming post is scanned and cleared. There they let me use a customs x-ray machine, like the ones that scan bags at the airport.

The resulting images were awesome.

Unfortunately, however, the quality wasn't anywhere near as good as I would have liked. I'd hoped for a similar file size to the black and white x-rays, something I could use for a large scale (or life-sized) screen print. However, unlike the super high definition scanners at the airport gates, this was an old machine which they use for training purposes. The resulting images are tiny and very low-res, and there was no way to increase the size/DPI.

It was still incredibly useful to talk with someone about how the system works, what the different colours indicate, the importance of biosecurity, etc, and I was very grateful for their willing help.

Documentation Weeks 7-8

After my research for the printmaking workshop/exhibition, I'm still interested in bees and paper making. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to find some steel honeycomb (which is used in the bottom of the laser cutter, and I've also seen it in the base of food cabinets in cafes...), and after hours of searching online and going to different hardware shops, I found one place in Newmarket that sold it... 

in 3 metre panels, shipped from overseas, at $1200 each.

Not going to happen.

But, in this same shop, a sample of a sort of folded cardboard panel caught my eye. And I thought maybe I'll just MAKE some honeycomb.

I first tried it with yellow pages, but the paper was too thin to be able to see and work with the folds. So I picked up a piece of scrap card to experiment with. The result was this little test:

Admittedly, it annoys me that it's not geometrically spot-on; but hopefully I'll find a better + more accurate technique for folding and gluing.
I was surprised by how much I liked the effect of the bits of writing that are visible in the honeycomb cells. Hope to push this idea...

Above: displayed with an embossed etching of bees in honeycomb

Miscellaneous

A few odds and ends I've been reading...

NZ Herald article: "Key to healthy living: Eat real foods"

Climate Change is lifting Iceland - and it could mean more volcanic eruptions

Papatūānuku = Gaia

Why Men Are Afraid of Going Vegan: "Refusing meat in our culture is never simply about just refusing a product… It’s about refusing everything it represents."

Calls for plastic bags to be banned in NZ

Millenials: A food obsessed generation "Millennials – those of us born between 1982 and 2004 – seem to be driven by the intense social media activity surrounding food, and continue to search for a better or more unique food experience than our peers."

National Identity in a Global Political Economy

Jane (4th year) lent me an excerpt of this book from her previous research:

True, Jacqui and Charlie Gao. 'National Identity in a Global Political Economy.' 

From the book: New Zealand Government & Politics, Raymond Miller, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Effluence

Documentation, weeks 5-6 - just a drawing that I forgot to post last week.

Documentation, weeks 5-6:

A test, trying to combine painting with screen printing. I colour-blocked the original photo [which can be seen here] by tracing over specific colour areas on a plastic sheet, which were then projected one at a time onto the canvas with an OHP projector, and I would directly paint over the shadows.

This colour-block layering resembles the process of screen printing - the slight differences in the position of the easel, transparency, and projector, resulted in some mis-registration. I’m happy with the outcome but I’d like to try it again with more transparent paint so the layering process is more evident, perhaps with watercolours.

This is an image of the braided river in the Canterbury Plains. Since the Tuakana trip in 2014 I’ve been thinking a lot about Fonterra’s policy of only buying milk from dairy farms where the cows are fenced off away from the river ways, a move which is imperative to the health of the rivers and the species that live in them, but which is ignored by many farmers. And no such guidelines are enforced with livestock cattle. Hence the problem of polluted rivers…

Chiara Lecca

Chiara Lecca’s sculptures in ‘Art & Ecology Now’
Dutch: “Still life” = stilleven = “life stilled”
Romantic languages: “Dead nature”

I find the human-animal connection full of paradoxes, but the attempt to understand animals is necessary to truly understand ourselves. Indeed it’s this kind of relationship I’m interested in, and man tends to divide it into categories - pets, barnyard animals, animals to be eaten, to be used for clothing or furnishings - and doesn’t consider its complexity.

Brown, Andrew. Art & Ecology Now. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2014.

Unpure NZ

An interesting (however unprofessional) website full of photos and factoids about the darker side of NZ’s “clean and green” image. There are some really striking photos in the slideshows, especially of cow herds under the heading ‘dirty dairying’.

Documentation: weeks 3-4

The first painting is like the first pancake: a guaranteed failure.

Based on this reference picture.

A total amateur with oil paints, I made the mistake of starting with the darker colours, which made this painting super mucky from the get-go, so I tried to just roll with it and muck it up even more. Perhaps there’s something conceptual in that struggle: trying + failing to clean up ‘dirty’ river ways. 

I found that the turquoise form in the bottom right of the reference picture looked like a face. Perhaps I exaggerated the similarity a bit. Thinking about the land as body + body as land; Gaia - the world as a single organism; river gods and goddesses, i.e. Tangaroa.

Documentation: Weeks 3-4

“Garden Fresh”

Copper etching, roughly A4 size

When I was younger I was a really really picky eater - the kid who never ate any vegetables, ever. 

Eventually I started eating some veggies, but I was incredibly wary of them for most of my teenage years, and if I found a bug in my salad, it was the end of the world, it was totally gross and disgusting and there was no way I going to eat another bite of green stuff, probably for another week at least.

How times have changed. Now I eat as many veggies as I can each day, and if I find a bug on my salad, I just pick it off and keep eating. And when this happens it actually makes me really happy. I take it as a good sign, because:

a: it’s nutritious (the bugs obviously want to eat it and I trust their judgement)
b: it’s super fresh (especially if the bug is still alive - great sign)
c: it means there were no nasty pesticides/insecticides on the plants I’m eating.

Most of the bugs in this etching were drawn using “An illustrated guide to some New Zealand insect families” (Elizabeth A Grant) for reference.

EDIT: This is totally about STDs as well. How shunga are those frilly lettuces?

This is terrible

Bayer, BASF and Syngenta are suing the European Commission to overturn a ban on the pesticides that are killing millions of bees around the world.
The dangerous chemicals Bayer and Co. make are neonicotinoids, or neonics. Neonics are soaked into seeds, spreading through the plant and killing insects stopping by for a snack. These pesticides can easily be replaced by other chemicals which don’t have such a devastating effect on the food chain. But companies like Bayer, BASF and Syngenta make a fortune from selling neonics – so they’ll do everything they can to protect their profits.
The EU banned these bee-killers in May 2013, after a massive public campaign and a clear scientific finding from the European Food Safety Authority that neonics pose huge risks to bee populations.

Petition here.

An incredible old book of botanical illustrations, used as a reference for lucerne etchings 1 & 2

It was so exciting to get free (free!) reign of the laser cutter during the EIPW in January. Using it to cut and engrave several hand-drawn honeycomb patterns, I was thrilled to realise that the bed of the laser cutter, too, is honeycomb patterned. How perfect; the connection was too good to be true. A mechanical, man-made structure, and the most efficient pattern is found in nature - the least possible perimeter so that bees use less energy+wax. Common sense creatures.

We also worked out, with a lot of trial and error, which settings could burn into lino - a mechanical linocut! - and I made several little laser engraved and cut-out bee stamps. 

Next time I’ll use the other 3D cutter as it has a ‘stamp’ setting, which gives slanted edges to the engraved parts. (Next time I’ll also have to pay for it, unfortunately!)

[Note: above images are from my gap year in 2013, which I spent trawling the art galleries of Europe and taking lots of photos of artworks that I liked. Over the past summer I have organised+compiled all of these. By doing so and uploading them here I’m hoping to find connections and identify common elements, creating a record of the things I felt drawn to and inspired by.]
Thomas Fletchner, one of his photographs on display in Zurich.
From his series entitled ‘germs.’

• stunning colour schemes+contrasts
• interest in nature and the environment, landscapes, plants, organic forms
• blur effect - many look more like paintings than photographs

Artist website.

Watercolour drawings from week 2. Supposedly our national animal is the kiwi, we even call ourselves kiwis, even though they’re flightless, timid, and so incredibly rare nowadays that most of us will probably never see them in the wild. Meanwhile rabbits and possums and other pests are so common, should we consider them our national animals? Since there are so many more of them in NZ does that make them more kiwi than the kiwi? How about cows and sheep?

And while we think it’s ours, the kiwifruit used to be called the ‘chinese gooseberry’ and was actually brought over from China in the early 1900′s.

• Thinking about introduced species / pests, about colonisation, immigration, national identity, analogies.
  

Also recently stumbled on Endre Penovac’s cat paintings and was inspired by his clever technique. The use of watercolour ‘bleeding’ to paint fur is really effective.

Talia Greene

I wish I’d known about this artist earlier! Her work is incredibly similar to the things I was doing for the EIPW over the summer, making prints of bees and honeycomb patterns.

Her work includes a series called ‘Colony,’ pictured. The swarms are created by glueing flies directly onto a print of an antique photograph or postcard. The collage is then scanned, and reprinted. Taken from this article.

The amazing wallpaper above is from Cross Pollination, an installation described in this website review from Printeresting. 

“The installation, Cross-Pollination (II), questions our assumptions about the disorder of nature and the sterility of human bodies and spaces, finding whimsy, design, and beauty among the apparent chaos. Bees emerge from vents and pipes in the gallery space, dismantling the filigree pattern to interpose their own structure on the walls, yet periodically also coming to rest within the geometry of the pattern. The pattern, honeycomb, and bees, are all composed of the same natural detritus – dried flower stems and stamen, bug parts, and human hair.”

“As pests and interlopers in our homes, insects elicit an uncomfortable feeling of loosing control of our bodies and surroundings. From a distance, their chaotic nature feels menacing and contrary to the order of human society. A closer analysis reveals a more complex balance between chaos and organization.”