light painting

One of the best parts about doing this show, for me at least, is discovering new and amazing creatives, and I am so glad that I was introduced to today's guest.

Let's go Behind the Shot.

[instrumental music] Hi, welcome to Behind the Shot.

I'm Steve Brazill.

This is the show where we try and get inside the mind of a great photographer by taking a closer look behind one of their shots from conception to completion, and all those stories and challenges that happen in between.

... uh, yeah.

I mean, I, I suppose.

Um, I mean, there's also, like, o- of course, the show is called Behind the Shot, so the wider, like, story of how we got to photograph the photograph, um, the meta story, so to speak.

Wendy talks about her time studying at Elam School of Fine Art at age 18, and why she chose to return to study years later, this time at Whitecliffe College in Auckland to complete her Master of Fine Arts.

We explore the work created in her two-year MFA course, her surrogate self-portrait series, and her light painting series, and what she gained from this experience, and also learnt about herself as an artist and as a person.

We discuss the experiences and environments in her life that have influenced her work, and she tells an amazing story about a funded trip by a collector to make work and exhibit in Jordan.

Wendy talks about why she is no longer interested in being represented by a gallery, her connections with the community, Mangawhai Artist Gallery, how she sells her work, her attitude to moments of creative block, what she looks for in a landscape, and her oil painting process, amongst many other things, of course.

And it felt, I guess it would've been kind of quite a personal body of work that you may not have wanted to exhibit.

It didn't really, it didn't really go anywhere in terms of public art, I suppose you'd say.

And then you went into your light painting.

I did.

[laughs] People know how to find images on, on the internet, of course, and, you know, they can go to your website.

But when was the moment that you started working with drones and with the light painting? And, and actually, did those two things coincide, and w- w- did those things happen at the same moment?

Uh, the, the drones came l- a little later.

Um, but the realization of what I was trying to do, uh, came first.

Um, and it was, it was August.

Uh, and it also happened to be the, the peak of the Perseids, uh, the meteor shower.

And at the time, I was experimenting with this new form of light painting, this new, um, this fiber optic, uh, strand which I was using to create interesting shapes with in long exposure.

Um, but I hadn't quite found it yet.