Award-winning blurry oil paintings: often familiar & always enriching. 

 

Hey from NZ’s deep South, Mel here! 👋🏽

My signature bokeh paintings might remind you of what it’s like to forget your glasses. The soft haze when you first open your eyes for the day. Maybe a scene viewed through a foggy car window?

Why bokeh?

These paintings capture the softness and beauty always around us, while banishing the sometimes-all-too-consuming details of life to a unobtrusive blur. 

Bokeh does 2 things: 

1. It simplifies: stripping away the nitty-gritty, hyperfocus, sharpness and hardness, and
2. It magnifies: it takes a pin-prick of light and grows it into a beautiful orb of colour and light.

Because life's an endless to-do-list

Like you, I've got my finger in lots of proverbial pies: as a trustee for Arts Murihiku, Secretary for the Southland Art Society and supporting other artists to thrive in their art businesses through Amanda Heath's Thriving Artist Business School.

(Let's not forget the 4 growing-too-fast kids calling me "Muuuuum", my 4^th generation farmer hubby, my constant canine companion and the 2 rescue cats that just became 4 🙈.)

I'm also in the middle of building a new art studio (I know, it's incredibly exciting!)

So yeah, I hear ya: it's a challenge to practice softness when we've got our attention laser-focused on all the 'pies'.

"Sometimes I think Heaven is just a new pair of glasses" Ed Dowling

Yes, there's a time and place for the 'glasses' that help us see sharply, critique the details and notice all the problems.

BUT, to enable us to shift from surviving to thriving, from achieving to appreciating, let's increasingly wear the 'glasses' that help us see softly, with compassion and generosity. The ones that simplify and magnify.

The ones that help us see the beauty and the good.

Life's going to happen, how we chose to look at it is up to us.

Let's put softness on a pedestal

Whether I'm on 'mum duty' in our farmhouse or 'art duty' in my Studio, I'm trying to find ways to see softly and look for beauty:

• Can I look past the scraggy bush to see the light filtering through the turning leaves? 
• Does the dust on my windowsill steal my attention from the spectacular sunrise out the window? 
• It's late and cold, but the Aurora Australis is painting the sky like a canvas.

Aided by a blurred lens, lots of jasmine green tea and an (almost) daily art practise, my bokeh art is embarking on a quiet revolution to stop you focusing so damn hard all the time, and help you to see softly instead.

x Mel