My character as a painter is founded on a childhood spent on orchards with a father who each year took us boys hunting in the Urewera, who read us tales of wild places and man eaters and shot deer with the 303 rifle, and later, the bow and arrow in emulation of the late great American archer, Howard Hill.
He said archers were the elite athletes of the Tudor age, requiring great skill and strength to fire up to 12 arrows a minute, holding a heavy bow in one arm.
Then he'll look down and see he has dropped his bow on the floor, and somehow it will seem to him that there's a great connection between these two objects.