The Street Prints Mauao Festival, Tauranga’s first street art festival, has 18 artists from around New Zealand and the world painting 16 large scale murals on buildings in the laneways and alleys of downtown Mount Maunganui. Based on the theme “Land and Sea”, it starts on Thursday 10th December and is run by Jah and Lovie Smith with sponsorship by Creative Tauranga and Eves Real Estate. It culminates in a Saturday festival (12th December) in Coronation Park from 11am – 5pm with food stalls, live music, games, giveaways and free street art workshops.  From 6pm, it moves to Astrolabe with a New Zealand made Street Art documentary showcasing the many talented Street Arts of New Zealand, plus games, art competitions and giveaways.

Over the four days until Sunday, the public can wander through the alleys to watch the artists and spend time in the gallery that Street Prints Mauao have opened.

There’s quite a vibe happening already, so I started checking out some of the previous work from these artists so we have an idea of what to expect.
Simon Ormerod going by the moniker ‘Cracked Ink’, originally hails from the north of England and now from the north of Auckland, and is known for his humorous characters, expressing huge personality across the walls.

Mica Still grew up in a small coastal town in Oregon, USA where the art scene was dominated politely by fishing boats and seaside watercolours. Very different from her vivid colourful works that give an optical punch.

Erika Pearce finds inspiration in the natural beauty of New Zealand, the sun and the ocean. Her artwork is unique mix of a large range of styles, from tattoo aesthetic to hyperrealism to full-scale murals.

Charles and Janine Williams, winners of the 2015 Ono’u Graffiti Festival in Tahiti, and creators of the controversial splashback in Jamie and Hayden’s Block NZ kitchen, will be painting here at the Mount in their distinctive bold style.

Two of my favourite artists coming this week are Dside and Andrew J Steel, who as ‘BMD’ went to Hawaii this year to paint one of the Hawaiian Airline service vehicles, reflecting the new route from New Zealand to Honolulu. Dside and Andrew will be painting as solo artists for our street art festival.

Catching up with James Stanbridge felt refreshingly like stepping into a retro 1950’s science adventure comic book.  He’s one of the twelve mostly idiosyncratic artists contributing to Creative Tauranga’s and Lightwave Gallery’s Bleeding Vinyl Covers Group Exhibition.

This musically themed exhibition, timed to coincide with the National Jazz Festival, was co-curated by Ken Wright from Lightwave Gallery and Angela McKenzie from Creative Tauranga. Album cover art, an important part of our musical cultural tapestry, provided an opportunity for artists to reinterpret a favourite LP cover, using a range of medium such as painting, sculpture, illustration, photography, graphic design and printmaking.

James based his two pieces on Led Zeppelin and it’s clear that his Moby Dick is reminiscent of their debut album cover.  James was known as ‘the drawing kid’ at school and tells me he “always planned to be an artist or a scientist.”  Growing up in Opotiki, he moved to Tauranga for secondary education, then on to study design. He works with pencil and has dabbled with paint but clearly likes, as he says ‘the particular-ness of illustration’.  As a detail-focused person the way he draws does reflect that.

This is his first exhibition of his original art, he is tutoring at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic and he will also be part of an upcoming exhibition at Lightwave called ‘Boys Toys’.

The Bleeding Vinyl Covers Group Exhibition will run until 6^th May at Creative Tauranga and then reinstalled at Lightwave Gallery at 30 Totara Street.

The other artists exhibiting are Stephanie Brebner, Clive Armstrong, Nick Eggleston, Ashley Grant, Elliot Mason, Anj Keate, Ken Wright, Lesley Robb, Don Overbeay, Angela McKenzie, and Nicol Sanders-O’Shea.

Colleen Waite from Kaitaia opened her exhibition at Lightwave Gallery, Totara Street, Mount Maunganui on Easter Sunday with a stunning display of mixed media abstracts that are both restorative and joyous.

Colleen Waite

Her first solo exhibition in the Bay of Plenty, “A World of Diversity” gives us her window view on life, and a sense that she is responding to what she has experienced with a resilient and assertive smile of hope.  In fact she mentions that she discovered her creative ability when using art to work through the sadness of personal loss.  Raised by a mother who was a dressmaker, she was immersed in colour and texture from an early age which instilled into her a fascination with design and colour. This permeates, literally, through her work, as she uses laces, fabrics, paper and other media to overlay and build threads of patterns and colour.  To me these represent the strands of feelings, thoughts and emotions that weave through our lives as we journey past loss, grief or anguish onto restoring a balance once again.

Colleen jokes that she has AADD (Artist Attention Diversion Disorder).   She has worked for many years in the field of Addictions Counselling, and it’s clear, that for her, she carries within an outlook on life that is both colourful and positive.  Pablo Picasso wrote “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”  This is evident in her work.

Overlaying the layers of mixed media, she applies resin which gives a transparency and glow to her work, reminding us that there is always hope for the future.  Colleen’s world is diverse and layered, balanced and restored, and she brings this to us in a remarkable way.

A World of Diversity showed from 18-30 April, with an invitation to meet Colleen Waite on Easter Sunday afternoon at the Lightwave Gallery from 12-4pm.

www.lightwavegallery.co.nz

Lightwave Gallery, 31 Totara Street, Mount Maunganui