Controlled landscapes and speech impediments

Yesterday we had a Art Day, going to a gallery in Lyttelton, and to the main art museum in Christchurch. New Zealand seems to be a very fertile place for the arts AND the crafts (every small town has a gallery with local crafts you can buy; knitted stuff, honey, lavender wreaths, tiles, hats, soap, ceramics etc...) and, like the Canadians, they take care of their own.
The art is not only of the beautiful-raku-pot with Moari-inspired swirls variety. It is also cuttingedge, modern, post-modern, made of rubber and spurting water, pop, tongue-in-cheek, urban and dystopian. As well as much more. I mean to say, it's a microcosm of the world art scene.
Looking at it helps me understand New Zealand, because mostly I have been at a loss in understanding this mirror-world on the other side of the planet (the MOST isolated major human settlement) that seems sometimes like a Cali beach city where everyone has the same speech impediment (Oh, that's mean. I'm just trying to highlight how COMFORTABLE and MELLOW it is here, and how familiar.) Their times of Colonialism were much more recent than America's, and they have been affected by the proximity of Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as by the strong British-settler influence. You can read this in the art that's represented, but you can also read another, almost stronger thread running through the artwork. I'm not sure if this is because of the political leanings of most artists, but there is a a concern for the environment and environmental protection that is very strong. It's not something you get into in college and then grow out of around here. It's not divided between different economic classes as much as it is in the US. It's just the natural reaction from living in a place that (A.) has incredible and breathtaking natural beauty to rival anywhere in the world (B.) been farmed and slashed and burned and logged and plundered from the very start, until there are almost NO regions of NZ that look the way they did before Colonization. It's eerie, driving through mountainous regions that stretch as far as the eye can see, all lush a green and beutiful, and YOU CAN LOOK THROUGH THE FORESTS, because the trees are all planted in a STRAIGHT-LINED GRID. Whole sections of the island are tree farms. NOTHING grows underneath them. There are also no animals. There are some birds and introduced nocturnal rodent-species (including the hedgehog- my favorite thing EVER), but you never see anything else. There are TONS of deer here, but only because they are raised for venison. All the deer are in pastures, fenced in, just like the bazillions of sheep, which make NZ look as well manicured and green-velvet as the finest golf course. It's a strange dynamic: natural beauty=totally controlled landscape.

Anyway, that picture up there is by my favorite NZ artist, Bill Hammond. He has pictures up at The Volcano Restaurant, and I am crazy about them. He does a lot of elongated, shag-headed (a shag is a brid like a cormorant) men, that stalk across stained plains and lang from trees. Excellent!