NZ goverment to ban growing and sharing food

just read this article... opposition to the proposed bill here.

25% of eligible voters didn't vote in last weeks election.. looks like NZ is more than happy for the capitalists to ruin the future.

shocking pink

I'm working out the the DFS store in the international departures area of the airport this month, drawing on posters and things for Calvin Klein "CK Shock". behold the fruits:

transformers!

new school Bumblebee commissioned canvas...

beneath the waves

latest work... a lovely poolside private commission!
detail:
latest on the Rena oil spill disaster: "The Government admits it has "dropped the ball" by failing to sign up to an international convention that would have protected taxpayers by an additional $12 million for the cleanup of the Rena oil spill."

I'm not blaming the government, but i think this is a clear sign that their dreams of offshore oil drilling are ill-conceived. Protect our beautiful oceans!

NZ oil spill disaster - some facts

just a few things I've put together from reading online...

• "It emerged yesterday that on the day the Rena struck the reef, Maritime NZ declined an offer of two inflatable barges which could pump up to 100 tonnes of oil at a time."

• Maritime Union general secretary Joe Fleetwood said he had been calling on the New Zealand Government to buy an emergency oil spill response vessel "for years'' but to no avail. "Now we're caught with our pants down and now we're looking to (salvage company) Svitzer to get their clean-up vessels from Singapore.''
  
  
• "This is huge. It will take a long, long time to clean it up - we've never seen anything on this scale before. It could take years" - Sustainable Coastline's director Sam Judd.
  
  
• "We stand on the brink of disaster if the salvage goes wrong," said Shane Wasik, NZ Underwater Association president and a local diver.

• Our reckless centre-right gvernment are talking about using a toxic substance to clean up. Rick Steiner, a veteran of the Gulf of Mexico spill last year, said the dispersant Corexit 9500 was not suited to near-shore waters. According to the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the use of Corexit during the Exxon Valdez oil spill caused people "respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders"

Wakatipu again

Lake Ohau from above:


I return victorious from Queenstown, where me and Elliot painted out notorious backpacker bar "Altitude":

also got to go riding at Cardrona.. here's Els:
returned to Glenorchy...to go 4wding in "paradise", back to Arrowtown to unsuccesfully look for gold, and painted a couple extra pics for Base X Backpackers. Cheers guys!

Maungawhau

Also known as, Mt Eden... the beautiful dormant volcano i see out my window every day.

I didn't paint the eyes in the pic they were already on the wall, I thought they looked cool so left em in

art in the toilet

Here is a tour of the restrooms I painted at The Conservatory bar in Auckland's new North Wharf district...

some positive news on the future

here's a link to an easy to read PDF about some exciting and scary technologies being developed now that sound like science fiction, but in reality, they're coming soon...

and here's some interesting uses of nano-technology already here and on the way:

The Book of Seven Seals discovered

The Book of Seven Seals, as mentioned in the Book of Revelation, has been discovered a few years ago in Jordan and since been snatched away by an Isreali! It's been photographed but not studied apparently. I'm not exactly sure why it has twelve seals but hey.

Welly before the storm

I am recently returned from a paint-fuelled trip to wellington to do some work and time for one fun...

2012 is soooo 2010

You know how screwed up our calendar system is? Firstly, it uses the supposed birth date of the Prophet Jesus Christ as start point for year one... but wasn't he born on Dec 25th? I don't think many historians or Bible scholars actually believe that this was the exact date anyway.
Second of all, the "Julian" calender used since the days of Ceasar, counted 365 days a year. but a year is actually 365 and a quarter days long, which is why we have leap years. but they hadn't calculated that, so in the 16th century they skipped two weeks of the year to catch up! Caesar did a similar thing in his time, leaping 67 days to catch up with the actual movement of the solar year. which brings me to my point...

So you've all heard of and sick of hearing about the Mayan Calendar cycle which ends on Dec 20, 2012. But hang on, syncing that calendar with ours, have we taken into account all this tampering done by Caesar and Pope Gregory with the dates? No. and if we do? Apparently, the end date of the Mayan Calendar becomes October 28, 2011. That's when comet Elenin will be passing very close to our fragile planet.


info about the calendars and the comet came from here.

depopulation

I've been reading about this for a while, and it seems that now the UN is starting to roll out this policy, of aggressively reducing the number of people on Earth. Certainly, war, disease, poverty and natural disaters are helping them along already. but check out these quotes from the powers that be, so you can see for your self that this is not a wacko conspiracy theory: (copied from here)

#1) The March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief....

"What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?"

#2) Microsoft's Bill Gates....

"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent."

#3) Barack Obama's top science advisor, John P. Holdren....

"A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births."

#4) George W. Bush's science advisor Paul Ehrlich....

"Each person we add now disproportionately impacts on the environment and life-support systems of the planet."

#5) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg....

"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

#6) A United Nations Population Fund report entitled "Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate"....

"No human is genuinely 'carbon neutral,' especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation."

#7) David Rockefeller....

"The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident."

#8) Jacques Cousteau....

"In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day."

#9) CNN Founder Ted Turner....

"A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."

#10) Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder....

"My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world."

#11) Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh....

"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."

#12) David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club....

"Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license ... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."

#13) Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger....

"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

#14) Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12....

"Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race."

#15) Princeton philosopher Peter Singer....

"So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!"

#16) Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs....

"There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…."

#17) Mikhail Gorbachev....

"We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."

#18) John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London....

"The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet."

#19) Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka....

"This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage."

#20) U.S. Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton....

"This year, the United States renewed funding of reproductive healthcare through the United Nations Population Fund, and more funding is on the way. The U.S. Congress recently appropriated more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. That’s the largest allocation in more than a decade – since we last had a Democratic president, I might add."

#21) Clinton adviser Nina Fedoroff....

"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people."

#22) The first of the "new 10 commandments" on the Georgia Guidestones....

"Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature."

free the art

today i painted a canvas at an Amnesty International drive on K Road... i depicted a renown artist who has been detained under unusal circumstances in his home country. as his supporters are finding their emails etc hacked from that country, call me a coward but i'm not naming him in this post cos i don't wanna go that way! the canvas is up for auction at Amnesty's exhibition next thursday. see ya there

a quick visit to CHCH

Just got back from a short trip to paint a small commission, see my fams and take some pics. in the city:

Here is a photo of where my flat i used to live in should be. You can see on the second level of the remaining building the interior lounge and hallway walls of the flat. A lot of folks will remember some great parties at that place.

directly across the road, still standing... LOOMIT and me, 2001

this is the job i painted out in Ashburton: (someones elses design)


Out in Lyttelton, some things are still looking pretty precarious:
this church across the road from my mum's house is one of the oldest in NZ:


next to my mama's house is another broken church, i painted on the blocks holding it up



Much love to everyone i didnt get to catch up with too, I admire all your strength in these turbulent times.

my volcano pre-occupation continues...

well, there's a new directory website that inists its not a directory, and i painted this at their launch party. behold Mt Eden erupting with party vibes.. (dodgy night photo)

even more exciting, or more so to us, was the amazing construction job me and associate Josh did on the temporary, free standing wall!


oh and here's a canvas i did last month for a friend, of an imaginary east coast dormant volcano. The theme is, even when dormant, there's always life in the earth just below our feet...

master blaster

Painted this one out at Corban's estate in West Auckland at the end of last week.. Got to have a jam with this "blaster" spray cap which is a lot of messy fun. Only really visible on the detail shots.



Thanks to Askew for lettin me have a go with it... if you like lookin at graf his Tumblr page goes hard, everything on there is amazing!

back to Taupo

Easter by the lake... found time to paint something there this time

this time, explorations lead to small lakeside holiday town Kinloch.
Here's Whakaipo bay on the way out, beautiful spot, nice for skimming stones too
unfortunately, we were covered in cloud most of the weekend, so instead of a view out to the snow-capped volcanoes over the shimmmering lake and all the trees glowing in vibrant autumnal colours, i took this over exposed washed out pic looking out to the lake from Kinloch.

if you want to know the origins of the Easter celebration, check my last year's post :)