Take A Bow Christchurch

I know you’ll find this hard to believe but I put my camera down for 10 days while we were parked up at the NZMCA Park in Weedons, on the outskirt of Christchurch city. This will be the one and only post from our time in Christchurch.

Well, I almost put it down. I had one photo shoot I wanted to do while we were there; take a photo of the beautiful ballerina on the back of the historic Isaac Theatre Royal, located in the centre of the earthquake devastated central city.

And the reason? Those that have been following my blog since the beginning will know of my love for a Tauranga street artist’s work. OD (aka Owen Dippie) is an amazing artist who has painted many works of art on industrial and business building walls around Mt Maunganui & Tauranga, along with New York, Melbourne & Auckland.

And this is another of his paintings, Owen was commissioned to paint the ballerina as part of Christchurch’s inaugural street art festival, his mural was painted as the ‘grand finale’ to the festival and has quickly turned into a loved and iconic piece of art.

I’m not too sure how long it will be on view as there is ground work happening on the cleared section in front of the mural. Eventually, I’m sure, a multi storied building will grow from this empty space. But as OD once said to me, when I lamented about one of his controversial pieces of art being painted over, “That’s the nature of street art, here one moment, gone the next”.

Here's my previous blog showing a number of OD's paintings- Girl With A Pearl Earring

We spent most of our time in Christchurch preparing the van and ourselves for winter; sending one of the diesel heaters away for repairs, changing the bedding from summer to winter, packing away summer clothing, airing out our winter clothes (and deciding we needed more) and sending away any unused gear to our storage shed back in Tauranga. Generally having a good spring clean albeit at the wrong time of the year.

We did spend quite a bit of time getting frustrated driving on the roads; we both commented on how busy the city was and how long it took to drive anywhere. The roads are very crowded and there are still a lot of road works, even on the outskirts, along with a lot of rebuilding and new buildings taking shape everywhere. Christchurch is certainly the city of traffic cones; over 100,000 apparently.

It wasn’t long before we were both keen to hit the road again and leave the city chaos behind; so keen in fact, we left 3 days before we had originally planned.