Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

This artwork is entitled The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, make of it what you will.

Framed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm Unframed Print
490×620mm Framed Print

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

Ever think we just have to sew ourselves back into the best versions of ourselves we can and then carry on? I have based this image on a thirties pin up and expanded her into the dark idea that has been around for decades of stitching the self. We all search for the heart to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with that attitude of just leaning into what seems to try to break us down.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

A3 Unframed 330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

The tattoo panther cat is a classic old school tattoo icon of the wild spirit which was always an image of fascination in my youth. "Grace And The Wild" is a study of that extraordinary marriage of stunning natural grace and the wild truth of living on this earth. This image is obviously about colour but also about putting a little of the wild side of grace in a living room for dramatic moment.

Archival Print by Lester Hall

Framed 544×670mm
Unframed 330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

Speaking to this iteration Elizabeth Windsor and referencing again her service and indomitable spirit I look to salute what solid values and determination create by way of legacy and heritage. While living in Te Tai Tokerau I of course have to tip my hat to the Mighty Taniwha but I have never been one, through parochial attitudes to hate on or bag the achievements, hard work and excellence of an opposition. The unparalleled run of championship wins that The Crusaders put together is now forever the thing of legend. Champions are always eventually struck down and this 2024 season was a brutal ending of what is inarguably the best Super Rugby team by a margin of extraordinary distance.

So, I have created this Canterbury Queen to especially celebrate striving to be the best and not sitting on laurels but turning up again and again to the task just as Elizabeth Windsor did. As I watched the Champions fall I didn’t celebrate their loss, I just recognised a legacy cemented in lore that is now challenging all comers to even imagine they might emulate it. This was a fun journey teasing my Blues loving mates especially as I created a number seven diamond broach and then went VII as a suggestion of the 5 plus two some might suggest and the rugby ball necklace. The changing of dates completed the story.

We Were Born For This, Born For This.

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Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

I’ve always loved the stories of The Flying Tigers and the Circus reference and leaping through flaming hoops. It was always a metaphor powerfully delivered in film and books. This is a celebration of jumping through life’s flaming hoops to our new seats. Sometimes we just have to commit to the leap and let the fates create the place we land. So many times in life I have seen friends take on life at a single leap into a new and better circumstance.

This artwork is just my homage to not giving up.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

I have often had to walk into life's storms when I would far rather just sit in a big chair, curtains drawn, eating pies and watching Shrek. But we need challenge, don't we, if we are to experience actually living - a wild sea is my favourite and I love sailing fast in a high wind, on a lonely sea in what is called an open loop of body memory and urgency in the moment. Life’s most perfect moments. Out there in a wild blow I have often felt more a seabird than human, wet and crashing through waves, flying along with nothing, absolutely nothing erroneous on my mind, just life in the very wild, very wet moment. Gannet's always strike me as being in that "open loop" as they commit to the dive and plummet like feathery missiles into the waves. This bird speaks to committing to the dive, making the choice, leaping into uncertainty. This artwork is to represent all of our decisions to lean in and take life on and I know that we have all had to take on challenges and this bird celebrates the spirit that might meet them in all of us.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

The ATTITUDE of GRATITUDE was always expressed keenly to me in early sobriety and I have enjoyed making that play on words with the breaking of the title with the Kea's wing.. Tartan has come to mean more recently as I experienced some of the influences it may have given my heritage and my father's and my grandfather's lives as they played out in Ettrick and Millar's Flat/Roxburgh in Central Otago. This artwork now expresses that Scottish heritage in the background of my father's favourite scallywag, the Southern highland parrot. What I’ve learnt is that without gratitude, happiness is hard work. It is essential that I look to understand in what way I might be grateful rather than how offended I might be by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. My dad, as a poverty stricken child in the depression in Central Otago found great humour in these birds finding the best of their day by landing into the snow after sliding down the tin roofs of mountain huts. Dad gained a full time job carrying four gallon tins of kerosene up to the huts at twelve years of age and described it as the best thing that had happened in his life…. that and warming feet in cow pats on cold Otago mornings… Both the birds and my father finding the best of the day to have a little fun.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

Life is a journey towards wisdom through the years but I find it easy to fall back from lessons well learned and into my old presumptions and the inveigling vines of unclear and over involved thought. This artwork depicts the spirit to understand that the entanglements that constrict us are just that and that a clear view of ourselves and our journey might be better found out and away from nagging doubts and problems. When we are at our most confronted and confused letting go and finding distance to gain perspective can often delver us freedom from the bondage of self.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

The sailor's tattoo legacy is huge and it is tied deeply to strong beliefs created by the difficult relationship with the sailor the sea and the ship. No place for a wavering heart. To ask the sea permission to sail is to truly become the sorcerer's apprentice and at some point the storm will come. Strong truths are what bring the human spirit back time and time again to nautical lore. Bless my life with the courage to hold fast and stand true on a pitching deck.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

I love those dead leaves laying around like jewels under Pohutukawa trees at the beach or park. Each one a different message of chance, change and passing on... Obituaries to one leaf from a tree of many where it helped grow the whole. Aren't we all like that, each a part of the society we help to make? This leaf, this New Zealand icon represents to me the one that could not have lived but for the many. Each of us might have this history of damage, disease, life and death etched on us as we lay still and silent after the race of life. I place it here, hovering over a field of kowhaiwhai which references Theo Scoon's artworks of the 1950s. Theo was an immigrant from Eastern Europe who as left me with one of my most basic references of Aotearoa. His patternation is my sky, my forest and my sea and even my paisley. Passing on, we must all move through this place and this leaf represents the trials but also the beauty of that process. Era i roto te rangimarie.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

I think it might be the time of The Earth at last, our ever smaller blue planet and here is one of our favourite icons of the natural, a ponga frond unfurling. I always loved it and it just seems to say something today for a planet and the land which sustains us that it seems we have been demanding far too much of. This natural image comes with a simple set of obvious affirmations. clean rivers, clean shores, clear skies, clean oceans. Do we finally stand at a point of change is the big question and I have painted this work to hang as an affirmation of the commitment, energy and unity that will be required from us all as we love Aotearoa, New Zealand and indeed Planet Earth more than we have been. First we must come to believe so that we might face the effort that confronts us.

Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

WIth spring back the Tuis are back! The blessing of our most vibrant, engaging and excitable bird makes my heart sing. Dogfighting and hooning from flower to tree and back, exalting in the verdant Northland spring. Tui are a special concoction of flight, eclat and chortling song and acrobatics, especially when drunk on natural highs they seem to crave... Bless them. Outside on my lawn are beautiful fields of camellia petals fallen to the grass which is starting to grow again so this artwork is a celebration of nature and it's unbrlidled beauty.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

Irishman Johnny Johnston arrived on the shores of Kororareka, New Zealand in 1827 after serving a seven year stint in New South Wales at the pleasure of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. After opening a grog shop on land he managed to acquire, Johnny's marketing genius saw him title his little pub The Duke of Marlborough hotel so as to leverage the eclat of the wealthiest man on the planet at the time. Having procured the young country's first official license to pedal spirituous liquors Johnny established New Zealnad's now longest running formal business entity. Johnny also built a good relationship with local Maori, learning te reo and helping to translate the Treaty of Waitangi which has become a landmark of New Zealand literature.

Signed Unframed Archival Print by Lester Hall

330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

The journey through taking a little old 1940s photo of my mum and dad to a celebration and recognition of them has been a year long affair. It was waiting in the wings for three decades but as I leaned, in earnest to the actual creating of it, it has required many updates of composition and delivery and a lot of enquiry into my life and theirs. I am thankful for what the journey of recognition has brought to my conscious and unconscious self.

This work is here to suggest to all that we are losing our heritage to perhaps overly aspirational lives lived into a future with no regard to our past. I was prompted into this determination after discussing a “heritage artwork” with a client who wanted to celebrate his great great great grandad’s life which was far more high flying than Sid and Beck’s I’d have to say and was aimed at 3,000 descendants of the man and the idea was an artwork created and 80 odd prints for familial inheritance. The conversation made me think of all of those lives spent building the spaces and places we now inhabit and as I applied my life experience and effort to my folks I realised that they navigated some heavy weather in those early and mid twentieth century turmoils while creating a future for others to live into.

As I formulated the structure of the image my mum and dad revisited me in so many ways and as an older and less self absorbed person I found myself very thankful to them but also far more admiring of the stoic journey they both walked. In my family we have made little effort to remember even where my mother and father are from and I know that this image has only just started to inform me of my background. I will take it to Otago, where Sid spent those poverty stricken days as a child, in full time work at the age of twelve and put it on a wall and wait to find out what it brings me while I experience the skies and seasons that might bring me a little closer to him again.

They were different days and what this artwork has taught me is that there are tens of thousands of lives out there that are being forgotten more every moment when perhaps, there are lessons to be learnt in looking back. There are many ways of commissioning artworks, books or any form of remembrance that bring us a deeper feeling of connection to something bigger than ourselves and that is what this little page stands to - REMEMBER.

As you look at the work you will see many motifs that speak of Sid and Becky’s experiences such as the cross stitches on the seam of mum’s skirt representing their six children, the street number of 73 where I was a child, dad’s handlebars folded down over the tank for those hard rides, mom’s blouse of rose patterns in blue and white representing her love of roses and the Virgin Mary. Dad’s army service, his childhood in Otago, Mom’s Irish with the green bow, Dad’s poverty as a child and Scottish heritage with the patch to his “strides”. The background field is a mixture of cultural heritage with herring bone tweed and William Morris patternation and cross stitched into that field are moments that speak to birthplaces, folk law and identity and at their feet the town that was home to them and their children.

I created Sid and Becky from a need to understand more of who I am and I am not sure what awaits the artwork as I determine how it will sit in the public space but I know I would like some of this image to be long lasting and operating as a reminder for all of the forgotten souls who walked us to where we are today. Sid and Becky on walls, remembered not as their specific identities but representing tens of thousands of largely forgotten souls and lives seems fitting but I’ll sit on it and think. I am open to the idea of taking commissions for such works but the aim of this page and this artwork outside of myself is to enliven the idea that perhaps there is great comfort and insight in taking time to properly remember the path that brought us here to this day, now.

Archival Print by Lester Hall

Framed 544×670mm
Unframed 330×485mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

After the extraordinary coverage of Elizabeth Windsor's life there is little to say other than she was a paragon of service and the even hand. This artwork celebrates who she was during her years as New Zealand's queen, her down to Earth nature, her time as a mechanic in the Great War and her love of the rural and the outdoor lifestyle. Horses, dogs and long walks in the hills were her loves, the Crown was her duty. Well done Liz.

Framed Archival Print by Lester Hall

490×600mm

Lester Hall - Te Tai Tokerau, Northland

"God grant me the serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change" is how the prayer starts…. I'm a drunk, thirty years dry and still need constant reminders that the best is yet to come as my bro Paora often says. Choosing to see what wonders and blessings are present and being grateful for those, not resentful of what is not present, is a practice for someone like me, not a natural state at all. "And Acceptance is the answer to all of my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation - some fact unacceptable to me and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment." I accept that I can never attain the never tired, never sexist, never racist, always sustainable, always perfect human status that seems to be demanded in today's World. I accept am not always my best person and believe that the content of my character, as Dr. King put it, might be judged by my efforts to mitigate my weaknesses rather than in the fact that like everyone else, I have them.

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