Sam Harrison

Christchurch printmaker and sculptor Sam Harrison seems determined to resurrect the art of portraiture, single-handedly if necessary! His dramatic, delicate woodcuts and his bold concrete busts demonstrate the strength of traditional media in skilled hands.

Have a look at his CoCA Artist Profile here.

New New Artland!

Each week TVNZ 7 show New Artland provides a New Zealand artist with the resources to make a new artwork involving their local community, and follows them around watching how it goes.

New Artland has just started it's second series, Saturday night at 9.35pm, TVNZ 7, and repeated Tuesday night at 9.35pm. It's hosted by music legend and art commentator Chris Knox, who completed filming the series before being incapacitated by a stroke from which he is still recovering.

Saturday night's show featured Wayne Youle organising a mass tattooing event where participants were tattooed with a NZ map marked with their particular home place or places. That episode is available online here.

All the shows from the first series are also available through the TVNZ On Demand website, here. Do have a look if you haven't seen them, they're such an amazingly diverse set of projects. And because all the artists are pushing the boundaries of what they've done before and also collaborating with their communities, the results are excitingly unpredictable.

The award for single most surreal idea must go to Phil Dadson with his project to send a brass band flying in a fleet of hot-air balloons drifting on the breeze.

The single funniest episode features painter John Reynolds wanting to personally mark and number all the road arrows on State Highway 1, before coming up with another idea which was equally amazing but less labour-intensive. If he ever gets sick of being an artist, I'm sure he could have a career as a stand-up comic.

The episode which moved me the most was Lonnie Hutchinson's Anzac Day work featuring thousands of pansies and tens of schoolchildren.

Hardest-working artists in series one would have to be Wellington duo Raised By Wolves (Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey) with their project Popping the Tent, featuring their own handmade tent, 3,000 balloons, and a lot of campers talking about camping!

Some of the most interesting works involve teaching art to young people. Ans Westra's project recruited local Petone schoolchildren to record things that were important to them with disposable cameras.

Judy Millar coached a roomful of initially reluctant high-school students in painting on a large scale, using mops, buckets, and other unlikely implements.

There's lots of other great stuff. Go have a look, the list of programmes is here.

Drape; Another New Zealand, Another United States

Christchurch's CoCA Gallery has two stunning printmaking shows, both of which close on the 9th of August. Get down there if you can, they're both stunning, and testimony to the depth of printmaking talent and expertise in Christchurch.

Drape





"Three Christchurch artists who teach at the CPIT School of Art & Design, combine to explore different associations of the word drape. Manipulating traditional design formats and imagery, ranging from the overt to the enigmatic, Drape sets out to subvert any expectations of domestic comfort. While Sandra Thomson and Michael Reed comment on social and political issues, Katharina Jaeger takes a more cryptic approach."
-from the CoCA website.

Thomson, Reed, and Jaeger have all made their own "drapes", ceiling-to-floor lengths of fabric, each lavishly decorated with their own imagery and concerns. Visually seductive, Sandra Thomson's and Michael Reed's drapes' patterns on closer inspection are edgy and political, while Katharina Jaeger's are surreal and disquieting.

See images from Drape here.



Another New Zealand, Another United States

"An exchange portfolio of prints between eleven New Zealand artists and eleven American artists.
Offering alternative opinions on what informs NZ and the US, this exhibition will either confirm or deny or debunk a range of views, with a mix of artists from various cultures. The New Zealand participants are Barry Cleavin, Dee Copland, Anna Dalzell, Riki Manuel, Michael Reed, Karen Stevens, Glen Stringer, Kiri Te Wake, Sandra Thomson, Sheyne Tuffery and Wayne Youle.
The American participants are Emily Arthur Douglass, Betsey Garand, Catherine Chauvin, Jill Fitterer, John Hitchcock, Anita Jung, Andy Polk, Kathryn Polk, Curtis Readel, Melissa Schulenburg,
Sylvia Taylor and Melanie Yazzie. "
-from the CoCA website.

Twenty-two printmakers, half from the US, half from new Zealand, contribute one work each reflecting on where they come from, creating a lively dialogue of styles and content.

See selected images from Another New Zealand, Another United States here. The reproductions on the website don't really do them justice, though. Go spend time with them if you can.

Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People

This book is pitched at young people but it's so clear and readable most adults would enjoy it too: it's art appreciation without the artspeak. Gregory O'Brien has chosen one work each from 45 contemporary New Zealand artists, and he outlines his thoughts on each one, in a fun and breezy style.

Sense of place

I saw Picturing the Peninsula at the Christchurch City Gallery the other day, and it was fascinating. It's a collection of paintings, drawings and photographs of Canterbury's Banks Peninsula: you'd be amazed how diverse the images are. Standouts for me were paintings from Tony Fomison and Dean Venrooy, and a photograph from Mark Adams.

I looked online for more information on Dean Venrooy's amazing paintings, and this was about all I could find.