This gouache work is from a series of six painted in 1977 entitled Inventories. Paul’s prolific output included drawing, painting, poetry, film-making and photography and she once commented that she was ‘aggressively in support of the minor—I like my work to relate to a room rather than a gallery’. Paul’s work can be seen as a visual diary of her everyday life and these two works are fine examples of this approach. They record her immediate domestic environs, a cluttered kitchen bench and a colourful bedroom, Paul herself said ‘I’m dealing with repositories of life, where it’s lived. I’m painting things like the coffee cups after a visitor has left. I am trying to capture an idea from life, pursuing it in a poem or a painting or a collage or a photograph.’ Although an extremely dedicated and focused artist whose work is included in all major public New Zealand art collections, she was not a careerist, once describing painting as: ‘not a job, not even a vocation. It is part of life, subject to the strains, and joys, of domestic life’.