Painting for Enviroschools Display

This post is going to be short and sweet. I am spending every moment that I'm not at work or asleep trying to find us a place to live in Wellington, where houses and apartments are expensive and often get rented before I have a chance to snap them up. I am traveling to Wellington (4.5 hours away) this weekend to look at as many as I can, and hopefully to nail one down. Getting prepared to make maximum use of this trip is overwhelming and stressful, but I'm convinced that it will be worthwhile. The good news is that while J can't come, my friend Jan has generously offered to come and help me look at places, as well as to host me at her house in Whanganui before and after, so I don't have to do so much driving in one day. Friends make everything so much better!

Anyway, this quick post is just to show you the painting I did for kindergarten over the last few weeks. We wanted a beautiful, colourful display to go behind all our Enviroschools information. For those of you who don't know, Enviroschools is a national initiative in NZ to increase conservation, environmentalism, and sustainability in schools. (Click here to read more about it in my Enviroschools post from last year). My teaching team also discussed that Enviroschools often uses a river as an image for a school/kindergarten's Enviroschools journey. I offered to paint a river background for our display over the school holidays, and so I took home the huge piece of fabric and went to work.

This is a small section of the painting, so you can see some details The swirls are called koru, and they are a central theme of many of our displays around kindergarten. They are like waves, but also like unfolding fern fronds, and are important in Māori culture.

Here is the finished product. Notice the size. It's about 30 feet by 4 feet, and I had thought that it wouldn't take me a million years. What was I thinking? I have never thought that spatial awareness was one of my strengths, but I impressed even myself with my total lack of understanding of how long this would take. Oh well. I got it done, and it is beautiful, if I do say so myself.

Here it is with all of our display items up. I should have taken a "before" picture, so you could see how much the background improves the display. When I showed this picture to J, he said, "You painted for over a week straight only to cover it up?" Which is a fairly good point, based on the picture. But remember, in real life, it is HUGE, and so the gaps between the things are big enough that you can still appreciate the painting.

Anyway, the moral of the story is the while I have no ability to judge sizes realistically, I have made something beautiful that will stay at Puketapu Kindergarten after I leave next month, and I feel wonderful about that contribution.