What do you get if you bring together a sunny Waitangi Day morning with a Scottish born New Zealand painter who has a penchant for Aboriginal art? You’ll have to get down to the First Floor Gallery, St James Theatre, in Courtney Place to find out!

What do you get if you bring together a sunny Waitangi Day morning with a Scottish born New Zealand painter who has a penchant for Aboriginal art? You’ll have to get down to the First Floor Gallery, St James Theatre, in Courtney Place to find out!

Morning Sunshine Waitangi Day is the largest of the 33 art works on show by The Learning Connexion graduate Morag Stokes. It was inspired by Waitangi Day sunshine streaming through venetian blinds  and falling over newly cleared ledges in her study at home.

“My husband took advantage of the Waitangi Day public holiday to tidy our very cluttered study”, Morag recalls,  “and when I came in, the window ledge and shelves below were completely bare, with bright shafts of light from the blinds falling and bending over them. The contrast between light and shadow made a great photo opportunity and I later used my photographs as the starting point for this painting. So, if Waitangi Day hadn’t been a sunny public holiday, this painting wouldn’t exist.”

An interest in Aboriginal art has prompted Morag to paint horizontally, sometimes sitting on her canvas on the ground while she works.

“A work in progress is a very different experience when placed on a horizontal plane,” she says.

“You can’t really see it properly  at least not as we are accustomed to viewing paintings. You can feel it, though, and as this painting developed around me, I began to feel its movement to the point of becoming giddy at times. When it was complete, I hung it for the first time, stood back and viewed it from a more familiar, vertical perspective. Wow, I thought, I’ve just painted a huge kilt!”

Morag talks about her work in this video interview with The Learning Connexion School of Art and Creativity.