Simon Gende: Gilas bilong lukim papa graun (Mirror to the world)
My name is Simon Gende. I was born on the 17th of September 1969. I was born in the village called Gere in the Gembogl District, Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea. My Language is Kuman. I am married with three wives and twelve children and have twenty-four pigs and also I’m a village leader. I start doing painting in 1989. I don’t get any training but I just paint on what I think. Most of my ideas I get from famous late Kawagle Mathias founder of the contemporary arts in PNG. In PNG we don’t have any gallery only one in Port Moresby but I live in the village so I sell my paintings during show events, sometimes when tourist boat comes to Madang and Lae and most of my time in front of Bird of Paradise Hotel in Goroka. In PNG it is expensive to buy canvas so I just use other cloth materials. I don’t have special brushes I just buy them from the school supplies shop and when they are old I throw them away. Most of my paintings are about big new stories in the world because most of people like to buy them because they want to keep the stories of what they heard over the news. It’s something like keeping history on the painting.
Image: ASYLUM SEEKERS, MANUS ISLAND PNG 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 71 × 107 cm
