With 2024 drawing to a close, only 7 more hours left here in Hawaii, I thought that I would review the first year, first month actually of The Bunker project. Only a couple of new murals have been added since I started this project at the beginning of December, so most of this first batch of paintings are Bunker murals that I just happened to have captured over recent years.
Yesterday evening a group of us went up to Polipoli Spring State Recreation Area for sunset and a picnic. The views were spectacular, looking across the Valley Isle to the West Maui Mountains, with Lana’i in the distance.
π€ Itβs Monday morning but feels like Sunday to me. I think because it is that week. The stretch from Christmas to New Year always feels like the longest week of the year to me, and I get completely disoriented. I canβt decide whether I just want it to be over, or to simply wallow in the holiday feel of it all?
This photograph is of the ocean facing side of the bunker. If anything happens here related to art, it is usually random graffiti. However, I took this photo because of the cow and her calf sitting in the shade of the building.
I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on Christmas Eve afternoon, as I do each year. I say βeach year,β though it is a fairly new tradition for me, perhaps stretching back to a few years before the COVID outbreak. I find that this short animation touches the Christmas spirit on so many levels. Whatever your experience of Christmas, I think that you will find it within this annual tradition.
When I went back to the cliffs to see the waves the day after the last posting, someone had defaced or graffitied over the image from the day before. So I thought to include that update here, as well as a photo giving another perspective of the location of the bunker. Here you see people out watching the big swell that was breaking that day. In the distance are the lowlands of the West Maui Mountains, as well as the island of Moloka’i.
I still can’t get use to this being a Christmas scene. It was a lovely couple of hours, watching the surfers, chatting with friends, dozing. And at times it feels… I’m not sure what the word is, wrong doesn’t convey the right meaning? Despite spending a good many years, decades, in the tropics, something in my cellular, read childhood, memory I think expects something else.
Iβm sitting at home on Christmas night, just the lights of the Christmas tree on, listening to A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.
Another double billing of the bunker. Aside from the front facing, main painting, some graffiti had also been added to the side, so I decided to share that as well.
One of my favourite Christmas songs is βI Believe in Father Christmasβ by the late Greg Lake.
Here is a version of the song sung by Lake and accompanied by among others, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. It is filmed at St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, in the City of London.
I posted a photo of this smiley face on the bunker before I started The Bunker series, and so I decided to
post two more angles of the building on that day.
I was going to post this yesterday evening, but after starting to write on our return I was just too tired to finish it. So Iβm completing it on the day after. Iβll leave the post in the tense fitting of my initial draft.