Tiki 18"x 24" Acrylic on Canvas

This tiki has a story. Or rather, it might have a story. We actually have two tikis, but my family can't remember where each of them came from. One is from Hawaii and the other is from Nuku Hiva, French Polynesia. The catch? We don't know for sure which is which. According to the story I'm told, the tiki from Nuku Hiva is named Dudley. My grandmother had seen Dudley(a fellow passenger on her ship) shopping and eyeing the statue, stating he would come back and buy it, but he never made it- Dudley died that day on Nuku Hiva. With fond memories of her new friend, my grandmother purchased the tiki he was eyeing and called it Dudley. Years later, she acquired another tiki from a museum shop on Kauai, and as the decades went by she lost track of which was which.
 
In 2019, I embarked on a 50 day cruise, sailing roundtrip from San Diego as far east as Vanuatu, including a stops at both Kauai and Nuku Hiva. The trip (as all cruises do in this remote region) had a lot of days at sea, so I brought my painting supplies. This tiki was painted onboard the ship, and represents two of the locations visited on the cruise- Kauai for the Tiki and Nuku Hiva's Hooumi Beach as the background.
 
In hindsight, I'm relatively sure that this Tiki I painted is actually not Dudley. The other tiki is much more similar in design to the Tikis I saw on Nuku Hiva. However, in the future if this painting is separated from this story, one might presume that the tiki was one from Nuku Hiva simply because it was painted with Hooumi Beach as a background.
 
I think this painting came out beautiful. It's a visual representation of why you might hear similar stories throughout Polynesia, but not the exact same stories. Polynesia is a region where many traditions were passed along orally, and so I can see how what happened in my own family reflects how stories changed over the generations for Polynesians, such as wether only the men were tattooed or only the women were tattooed. Depending who you ask, each person or each island will have it's own twist on history.