Sepik Diary, Limited Edition

Sepik Diary is a sensitive and powerful record of a celebrated artist's 500 mile journey by dug-out canoe along the world's most artistic waterway, and one of its last frontiers... the Sepik River of Papua New Guinea, which is acknowledged as one of the great centres of primitive art.

Sepik Diary speaks for itself as the work of an artist of rare ability, perception and integrity, at home in, and fascinated to the point of obsession by, landscapes, situations and people far removed from the inspirational norms of most Western contemporary artists. To this he has responded with a visual artistic and literary statement of unique sympathy and excellence.

The abstract expressionist paintings of Frank Hodgkinson have been shown in major museums in Europe and the United States. Though there is a sense of abstraction, the expression in this diary is vividly real. Through his fever of seeing and observing, the richness and diversity of place, people and living tradition are urgently transposed into a truly graphic experience. The prose and the sketches are both lyrical and descriptive, exposing an artist's vision of a culture so vital and so different from any Western aesthetic experience.

Frank Hodgkinson collected artefacts for many years, but it was not until 1976 while judging the National Arts Awards in Papua New Guinea that he had the chance to fly to Wewak and spend some days in the Sepik-Maprik area. Intrigued by a sound pitched so high as to split the eardrums, arrested by the massed stridulation of dragonflies along the banks of the Sepik, he determined to paint that noise and to explore the river in greater depth. The following year he returned as artist-in-residence at the National Arts School, and with his wife Kate and design lecturer Stalin Jawa, canoed from Pagwi to the Sepik delta in the Bismarck Sea.

His diary of that rugged experience celebrates an exhilarating journey among a people of prolific creativity.