A Journey's End

A fine farewell to New Zealand.

It has been a good couple weeks sharing my New Zealand experience with my parents. It was quite a treat. Some highlights have been seeing rare Orca whales in Wellington harbor, walking and talking along the black sand beaches of New Plymouth and touring the Art Deco capital of Napier. New Zealand has become a predominate player in my life and now it is bittersweet leaving. While I will dearly miss the people I have met and reconnected with here, I look forward to seeing my dear friends back home. But one thing I can take with me and cherish is the fact that I am now able to call another city across the world, home. While this chapter in my life comes to an end, I await the next chapter with a level of pure excitement, and fear for what comes next. Like Gandalf said, at the end of the Lord of the Rings, "My work is now finished. Here at last, on the shores of the sea... comes the end of our Fellowship. I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil." My adventures are not over, all I must do is to decided what to do with the time that is given. But regardless, I will be Robserving all the way. Thanks to all that have followed me in my blog, and keeping in touch with me. As for the future of this blog, my thoughts are that I will want to continue to update every so often. So if you are interested in what I am up to please pop on and check it out. 

Nearing the End

Apart from my smaller posts recently, I felt like I had to give you all an update on the larger things I am working on. Recently, I have finished my semester at Massey University. The end was actually not that tough. However, around finals week all the freshman and sophomores in the Cube (my accommodation), were running around with their heads cut off trying to cram and catch up from the plague of procrastination that runs rampant at Massey for their first final hand-ins. It was quite humorous because, as a senior, I have experienced the goods and bads of finals weeks before and have learned how to properly prepare for that. If you just work consistently throughout the year its not hard at all. All my things have been handed in and all the assignments are done. It is a weird feeling coming to the beginning of the end for my college career. The notion of being one more semester out from Wheaton is terrifying. The stress of jobs, internships, applications, relationships, etc. is weighing pretty heavy on my mind. But, I have done a couple things to deal with that. I normally go out for runs around Wellington, I read books, and I work on art.

            A couple days ago, some international friends and I left to hike the Tongariro Crossing as stated on the previous post. We left early Monday morning and arrived four hours later to a stunning day at Tongariro National Park. The plan was looking good. The next morning a storm hit that came a day early that shut the park down. It was deemed unsafe to do the crossing and we were prohibited to go due to violent winds on the top. It was a huge bummer. But we decided to do spend the day in an equally cool fashion. We rented some hard-core mountain bikes and off-roaded through the Tongariro National Forest for about 5 hours. It was tough but extremely rewarding. So we ended up leaving satisfied with the trip. Hopefully when my parents arrive, I can challenge the Crossing once more.

            Yesterday, the same group of internationals left to visit Matiu/Somes Island. It was here where we ended up walking around the entire island full of exciting plants and the illustrious home of the giant Weta. We saw a few and they are hideously remarkable.

            Lastly, I finished a book entitled Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community by Wendell Berry. It was a fantastic read! It will be pretty hard to describe in two paragraphs, 5-8 pages would do better, but essentially it was the justified ranting of an angry farmer against the present state of the world and its materialistic cravings. Berry doesn’t end by accusing the world and not backing anything up with intelligent arguments. Berry writes in a way that tries to unveil the hidden agendas of the world while also proving an alternative “way out”. He writes so that the reader should understand how a community is supposed to be. I am not calling all of his stuff correct but definitely worth the read.

            I am now a month out from returning to the United States. It has gone rather quickly. Leaving will be bittersweet. I love the people, land and customs here but will be very excited to see my family, friends and school once more. The journey is coming to an end and as this chapter in my life wraps up I await a new one just around the corner. Yet, still, I will be robserving all the way.

On a side note…I am having my Senior Art Solo Exhibition at Wheaton College on the 4^th of April. While this date is still pending, you are all invited to my show expressing the talent I have acquired while studying art at Wheaton College and my journey into becoming a professional artist. If you are interested please send me an e-mail and I will get you updated information. I would be honored to have you all at my show. The date will be anywhere around the 4^th of April. Cheers.

Robs

More pics!

Tongariro Crossing

Tongariro National Forest

Koru: Young and Old

Wellington City on a Nice Day

Mt. Doom

This is it. Classes have ended for the semester. My journey is coming to and end and now its time to finish it. Tomorrow, I am off to conquer Mt. Doom. I shouldn't be this stoked about walking about in Mordor (Tongariro National Park Volcano) but I totally am. I even brought my own lil ring to throw into the fire.....Am I just a super nerd and brought a ring to NZ or did I just find it in my backpack from years ago? The world will never know. This hike is 8-9 hrs long and, as I have heard, is an absolute spiritual walk. I am hoping to share this all with you when I am done. This one is for you Justin.

Dinner Time!

This post is going to be completely unlike the rest.....short, tasty, with a touch of good ol' fashion Robby humor. Apart the weighty things I am feeling and the pressures of finals next week....a touch of good food does wonders.

Below.... an equation to be thankful for.

Hungry Robby+ Food (Garlic cloves, spinach, onion, tuscon seasoning, spinach, crushed black pepper, salt, egg, cheese, and sausage) + Cadbury Chocolate to end = Happy Boy.

Good words of wisdom:

Proverbs 25:16

....eat just enough--to much of it, and you will vomit. 

Navigating Space

I use this title to illustrate what I am thinking about and artistically challenging recently. Being so far from home in a land that is vastly different from my own, I still have been strangely uncomfortable and I don’t know why. I find myself reading a lot working on art or nothing at all just sitting and thinking. I have my spots around the Wellington area that I go to just to think and meditate for hours on end. The amount of artistic freedom I have here in NZ is fabulous, but can be partially paralyzing. I have racked my brain for new inspirations, or cool new design ideas to work on, but I have been getting nothing. I like living in new possibility, I hunger for context and thrive from discovery. This notion keeps me moving in a forward direction. Now, however, whether by divine intervention or something else I appear to be frozen in my footsteps. For example, in Maori Art: I feel bound by rules, yet free to explore. Constricted by tradition yet able to offer my interpretations. When I, a Pakaha (white person), create I feel as if I am in a no mans land surrounded by cultural booby traps.  This void I feel is uncomfortable. In each creative turn I take I feel as if a traditional land mine is about to explode underneath my very feet, resulting in a negative vibe towards me and more so members of my own country. This unintentional ignorance of the lines of Maori Art tradition keeps my mind and body from finding its place.

             It seems, maybe, that I need to stop mindlessly working and pull my head out of the canvass to look up and observe what is around me. That is what I am doing and what I have found is that, unlike Wheaton, student life is raw especially in the art students. It’s an extreme blessing and a curse to be an artist. We see, feel and understand the world in a very intimate way. This is why I think artists like Van Gogh, Dali, and Goya went nuts. They saw the world in a very special and intense way that they went insane and created out of the only way they knew how to communicate--namely paint. They were artistic geniuses but crazy people. I am not going crazy, just to reassure my parents, but I resonate with how art can attach you to the world in an extremely intimate and yet sometimes dangerously poisonous way. I see Christ as my lifeline that grounds me in my every thought and action. However, the rawness of the students who attend art school is intense. I find sometimes I am not in control, just tumbling endlessly through the routines unable to break free. Art school itself is awesome but the student shows and art that the students produce is VERY raw and “angsty”. Religion itself seems fundamentally unwelcome especially in an artistic form. That is what I find hard, Christ is so important to my art, and if that is unwelcome it leaves me with relatively nothing to grip onto. This has forced me to think of how I can represent Christ in my work more creatively. It is a humbling thing to work in an extremely artistic space. We live, eat, and breathe art. I absolutely love it….and yet sometimes I feel there is much more to creation and living than just painting. So it justifies the effort and experience in leaving the comforts of my studio to live in the world. I find it hard to communicate to you all sometimes because it feels as though I need to prove myself in front of you and have something to show for myself. In fact, the things I have to show are strangely not in visual format. I am yet gaining a basis for my work, broadening my field and experience, and figuring out what inspires me. This is what I got:

• ·      I am fundamentally driven by the unique gift of living in the presence of other human beings. We are so special, and so blessed. Geez. I just finished watching Gravity (great movie) and it really nails home the blessing it is to live with others so that the weight or gravity of loneliness does not crush us completely.

• ·      I am inspired by movement. We are, in fact, made to run. Anatomically, we are beings not built to sit, stand in one place, or even walk. We are made to run….. Our bodies are anatomically built to run! How cool is that! So it seems like a just work to highlight our ability to move ourselves and others, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. in artistic form. What does this look like?

• ·      At the present moment I am disgusted and uniquely attracted to the concept of liminality. I was discussing my concerns, discomforts, and fears of being apart from everything I know with my parents and they lead me to the word “liminality”. The word literally means threshold. Author and Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr writes, “A liminal space, the place of transition, waiting, and not knowing is…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. (This is all thanks to my parents for leading me onto this topic because it perfectly describes what I am going though with my final year at Wheaton, Senior Show, financially and the questions that lie in the future. What does this look like?

• ·      I am interested but not too knowledgeable of the concepts of balance, place, connection and orientation. These are things you can’t learn or understand from a textbook but rather experience only. What is our place in the world? Why, do we do the things we do? By the things I do, how am I influencing others? What does this look like in artistic form? It’s the job of the artist to notice things that normally go unnoticed.

• ·      Of course this all comes from the Creator himself, who is the light of the world and heart of my work. I would be nothing without Him.

 I am sorry for going on and on about these things. I hope some of you understand this, if not don’t worry, its me just trying to process some things in writing. 

Here are some pictures for you all, for fun:

Cool Swing Lucian and I found:

At the Sunday Market

Hobbit Day Out

The Men Go South

Hi friends,

Its been a while since my last post due to my two week mid-semester break. My friend Lucian and I traveled down to the South Island. We visited several big cities and smaller towns. Let see, to start of the break on the 25^th we left to attend an All Blacks game vs. Australia! (All Blacks won). It was an incredible atmosphere, full of people in black clothing chanting for the All Blacks. Seeing the Haka live was insane! The next morning we left to catch the Interislander Ferry across to the South Island. It was a three-hour trip across the bay and we could not have caught it on a more beautiful day. The sun was shining; the ocean was calm and clear, and best of all it was hot out for the first time in a long time. It’s just turning into spring here in NZ. Once we arrived in Picton, we immediately took a bus down to Christchurch where we stayed at one of my flat mates houses for the night. We were well looked after, had a great meal and a good nights rest. Then early the next morning we caught another 8 hour bus to Queenstown. The scenery as we passed was crazy. We made several stops along the way. Lake Tekapo, Lake Pukaki, Mt. Cook were absolutely stunning. God blessed us with perfect weather throughout the trip. We stayed in Queenstown for seven days. Queenstown is your typical ski-town of NZ it actually reminded me a lot of Vail. Snowboarders and skiers would come back into town at night and walk about as the sun set over Lake Wakatipu and the stunning Remarkables Mtns. just on the other end of the lake. During the seven days we wandered around town, ate world famous Fergburger twice (3^th best burger joint in the world), took the gondola up the mountain and took some pictures, Luged down the mountain, traveled to Wanaka for a night and visited Puzzling world and Kayaking in the lake, and last but not least, visited Milford Sound. I honestly think that Milford sound, whether in good weather or not, is possibly one of the most beautiful places on earth. The drive took 5 hours to get there, but certainly was not boring. We would be travelling down massive valleys carved out by a prehistoric glacier long gone. As we drove to our left and our right were massive and very steep mountains sticking up like razor sharp teeth into the clouds above. You could not see the top due to cloud cover, but what was more amazing was that as we drove gigantic waterfalls were pouring out of what seemed to be the clouds but actually the tip tops of the covered mountainside. It was truly the most realistic picture I have for Rivendell if it were real. At the end of the bus ride my neck hurt from looking up so much and we had not even gone to the cruse in the fjord yet. It was also stunning being out on the water next to all the waterfalls, and massive mtns. …..What a day. When we got back we had a couple more days to hike and wander about town. Then we left on the 31^st of Aug. to visit Dunedin. We visited the Cadbury chocolate factory and several old cathedrals around town. I ate so much chocolate I got a little sick hahaha. But after one full day we flew back to Wellington.

Here is our route:

A. Wellington, B. Picton, C. Christchurch, D- F- H. Queenstown (3 times left and returned), E. Wanaka, G. Milford Sound,   I. Dunedin

            I think we did it right. We took busses down and saw NZ for what it was, and flew back up to rest and relax back in our flats for a couple more days before school. I can now say that I have spent more than a week just backpacking around NZ. It was absolutely awesome. God is good.

            School starts today, so pray that I finish my second part of the year strong. I really miss all of you and miss being home with familiar people and close friends. It’s weird that Wheaton has started and I am not there. I am loving it here but am certainly excited to finish Wheaton with all my good friends.

Robs

Here are some pictures from the trip:

we were 7 rows up!!! 

Interislander Trip across the bay

Kaikoura

Twizel

Lake Pukaki 

On our way to Milford Sound

Milford Sound Mitre Peak

Queenstown and the Remarkables 

Dunedin Cathedral 

            

Clash of the ARTs

Hey everyone! Sorry for the delayed blog post. I try to post once every week or so, but recently school has been very busy. I have just completed mid-term week and had a crap ton of hand-ins to do. Art and Industrial Design School is very challenging, especially around mid-term week because the level at which your professors want you to work and present in class is really high. However, most students have been slacking off on things because of the high bar. It has been interesting to see the difference between the type of students that attend an Art School and me, who comes from a Liberal Arts School. For example, I had a 15 min. group presentation this past week on the chemical, mechanical, and design properties of Nylon fabric. I, however, got the short end of the stick and got stuck with some pretty lazy students. Two of the members are legitimately, the Crab and Goyle (Harry Potter reference) of NZ. They bumble around making jokes and doing 0 work. This one particular student had a test after our presentation in which he had not gone to one lecture or tutorial for, for the entire semester. We had two weeks to present and when the day came to compile all our work on a PowerPoint they had 10 lines each, copy-pasted information from Wikipedia. It was frustrating to work with. Not only that, but when we had to present they “forgot” their written notes and, during the presentation fumbled around in their backpacks for several minutes and then proceeded to read the PowerPoint word for word….. Sorry, just thinking about it irritates me.

            But this got me thinking about the differences between our different styles of education. While it is true that not every student is like that here at Massey, the philosophy behind learning is vastly different. Here at art school the techniques and craftsmanship of each individual student, when they work, is far better than I can do. But it is only surface level. When you get behind that, the depth of the research and inspiration is lacking. There is nothing, it seems, that is supporting their work other than raw passion. While the world finds this inspiring, I find it somewhat shallow. I believe that work, whether art or not should have the same level of intensity and passion to it. So when I study astronomy, health, Bible, or philosophy, I believe that the engrained disciplines within these fields should feed my passion for art theory and making. So, I have found that Liberal Arts education vastly more valuable than an education solely in the fine arts. Technical strength will come in due time after much practice, the philosophy behind it is, as I have experienced, much more valuable and rare to find. The lecturers as well, seem different. Here they seem to be artists who teach just to make ends meet, whereas at Wheaton the Art professors seem to find a passion and enjoyment for teaching us. So while, they might be artists to they are equally good at teaching us and communicating critical things for us in life and in art.

 Yet, the things I have been exposed to here have been invaluable. The expectation to dream big and work hard is supported by many state of the art facilities (lazer cutters, wood burners, Styrofoam cutters, welding machines, etc.). I can say now that I have experienced an art school format of education. If you enter into an art school with the right mindset, you will go places.

But now, I am all done and ready to start my 2-week mid-semester break. Tonight is the big clash of the rugby titans All Blacks vs. Australia and I am super excited to be a part of it. Then in the following weeks I will be traveling up and down the South Island. I’ll keep you posted with many pictures to come!

Here is a painting I have done for my Maori Art and Design class. It is a representation on the Maori creation story. It depicts the sorrow that was described from the overturning and separation of Papa-tu-a-Nuku (mother earth) and Rangi (Father Sky). The x's represent Albatross Tears in Maori, and the Koru swirls represent the sinews that were cut that once bound them together.....parallels to the Fall of Man...I think so.