Pukaki Blue

Acrylic on canvas with paua panels — personal work

Lake Pukaki is famous for its colour. That extraordinary teal — somewhere between turquoise and deep blue — is real. It comes from the glacial melt off Aoraki, Mount Cook, carrying fine rock flour that suspends in the water and catches the light in a way that stops you in your tracks.

I drove past Lake Pukaki many times over the years. It's a passthrough on the road into the central South Island — you don't go there, you go through it. But some days, as you come over the rise and the lake opens up in front of you with Mount Cook sitting above it all, it's simply breathtaking. Not every day. But some days.

Eventually, I had to paint it.

This is a personal work — no client, no brief. Just a painting I needed to make. The composition is straightforward: the teal water, the mountain, that wide Canterbury sky with its sweeping high-altitude clouds. But the bottom third is where it gets interesting.

The three panels beneath the landscape are painted with specialist metallic and interference acrylic paints — the same techniques that give my paua shell paintings their characteristic shimmer and depth. Many people who see the painting reach out and touch them, convinced they are real paua shell. They are not. That's the point.

It's a painting about New Zealand in its truest sense — the landscape above, the lake below, and the light that holds it all together.