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.

Sad news

Prominent Auckland painter Peter Siddell has a terminal illness. Stuff has an article:

"A lot of my painting relates back to childhood memories," he adds, "that, and a lot of it are about places I know, certainly the vistas of Victorian villas and volcanic hills are just the sort of stereotype of Auckland that I remember from my childhood."
His paintings are noted for their lack of human interference no telephone poles, cars, pollution or graffiti mar his work. His art is a monument to the memories of his childhood, featuring significant images held by a young and inquisitive mind.

I really like what he says about painting:

Siddell sees painting as "an exercise in controlled disappointment you start off at the beginning with a brilliant idea and think `oh, this is going to be a great painting', but as soon as you make a few marks on the canvas then you find that what is planned is going to be affected by the initial brushstrokes and the painting ends up very different from its original conception.

Read the whole article here.

And you can enjoy a selection of Peter Siddell's paintings here. Many of the paintings in his image gallery are accompanied by his own illuminating commentary.

See Rita Angus online

Te Papa has curated a huge touring show of Rita Angus' work from their collection, which is currently in Dunedin, and will move on to Christchurch and Auckland during 2009. To promote the exhibition they have extensive material online here, with high-resolution zoomable reproductions and commentary provided.

This is such an amazing resource on one of New Zealand's foremost painters. Have a look!

Russell Moses: Garden of Light

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery has a brilliant Russell Moses show. Moses' works are paintings, sculptures, and fascinating hybrids of painting and sculpture. In one of my favourite pieces he has made a string of giant clay beads in the shape of a stellar constellation, to hang over a painted clay ground. Stars made of earth: I love it!

Other works reference mining, with patterns of metallic pigment emerging from a clay ground; Green paintings mimic the markings of pounamu, but also of light on water or trees in a landscape. Cross motifs in his work refer to measurement and surveying, the carving up and carving out of the land; the patterns he makes also evoke natural shifts and processes: night and day, movement of the sun and stars, seasons, growth and erosion.

You can see more examples of his beautiful work here.

New Zealand - A Painted Country: Contemporary New Zealand Artists Paint Their Favourite Places

This lovely book shows the incredible diversity of approaches within contemporary New Zealand landscape painting.

My favourites include Neil Driver (Central Otago), Nigel Wilson (Alexandra/Clutha), Susan Webb (Wellington Coast), Geoff Tune (Gisborne, East Coast), and Rachel Olsen (Coromandel).

New Zealand's Favourite Artists

This is a wonderful compendium of contemporary best-selling New Zealand painters. It seems to be out of print, but you can download it here. It's a very interesting collection, full of surprises: lots of brilliant artists I'd never heard of. Among my favourites were Barry Ross Smith's witty beach scenes and farm scenes; Jane Puckey's striking botanical pictures; Phillip Maxwell's narrative still lifes; Susan Webb's painterly landscapes; Neil Driver's serene landscape/interiors; and Nigel Wilson's shimmering, dreamlike landscapes.

If you think the work of popular painters would be all in the same style or have similar subject matter, you'd be wrong! What a diverse group. Have a look.

Art in the 'Hood

The building that used to be the local corner shop is now a painter's studio. There are giant, photorealist paintings in the window. They're of children's toys which look familiar but somehow altered, somehow disquieting. Behind the display, but still visible, is a partly-finished work still being painted. If you go at the right time, you can see the painter working; and if he's not there working you can go around the back and knock on the door. I don't know what it's like for him working in a fishbowl, but it's pretty interesting for the rest of us. He is David Woodings, and his website is here.

Grant Hanna

I'd never heard of this witty New Zealand surrealist painter before I stumbled upon his I Dream of Fish Too, at Ferner Galleries. Other favourites of mine include 4 Cows and a Sheep, 3 White Coats and an Un-ion, and Another Day Closer to Death.

I really like the way his landscapes are both so recognisable and so altered.

Sam Mahon

I didn't know Sam Mahon was a painter as well as a sculptor, but the Christchurch City Art Galley has this amazing example, and this too. I'm sure his upcoming show at CoCA's Mair Gallery will be well worth seeing.

And kudos to the City Gallery for putting their permanent collection online. It's a great resource, and it's part of what public galleries are for.

Jingle Jangle Morning

Bill Hammond's huge new show at Christchurch's City Gallery is a knockout. It shows the development of his personal iconography of bird-headed figures, his love of repeat patterns, his transcribing of musical forms into painting, and his dream-like primeval landscapes. I love the freedom of his drawing and compositions, and dripping, streaky applications of paint, and the stunning effects he gets from an almost monochromatic palette. Go see it 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.

A nest of singing birds

The New Zealand School Journal started out 100 years ago as a textbook-substitute, but it has evolved into a cultural and literary treasure. So many great New Zealand writers and artists got their break with School Journal.

To celebrate the School Journal's centenary, the National Library is showing a selection of original art contributed to the Journal by such big names as Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Louise Henderson, Juliet Peter, and many others.

The exhibition takes its name from Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's description of the Journal's office as "a nest of singing birds"; A Nest of Singing Birds is at the National Library in Wellington until the 21st July. You can read more about the exhibition here. And some historical background here.

And if you want to send your own original work to the School Journal, this is the page for you.

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.

Photorealist to photographer

I always assumed Grahame Sydney painted his beautiful landscapes from photographs, but apparently he works from detailed sketches. He was unable to sketch in the Antarctic owing to the harsh conditions, and so he took photographs instead, which he is exhibiting at Christchurch's Salamander Gallery from the 20th of this month. The press release and some pictures are here.

I'm interested that he says he has not altered the photographs since taking them, and that he hopes they show his individual "eye". Many great photographers have shown their individual vision precisely by working on the images: Ansel Adams, with his famous Zone System, spent many hours adjusting tonal values in his pictures.

Adams is quoted as saying: "Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships" :-)

Colour of the Antarctic

I also note that Sydney's Antarctic photos, like Craig Potton's in his recent show, show the snow and ice as pale grey. For a camera to register detail in the lightest areas, it must be set to underexpose - to register bright white as a pale grey. This can be modified in the printing stage, by overexposing (or "pushing") to turn this palest grey back to white. Of course, the more the image is pushed to white, the more detail is lost. Potton and Sydney have both opted for truth-to-detail rather than trying to replicate the blinding whiteness that must be such a feature of being in the Antarctic.

Soaring

Joanna Braithwaite's painting Bee Being, of a figure wrapped in a swarm of bees, apparently flying through the air, is one of my favourites. That picture features in a lovely article on Braithwaite in Art New Zealand magazine.

Braithwaite shares some of her themes with Australian sculptor Patricia Piccinini, whose incredible show of human-like animals, hybrid animals, and animal-like machines at the City Gallery, Wellington, early last year is still viewable online. The online presentation features audio commentary by the artist herself.

Lots of birds

Te Papa has put out an amazing new book on extinct New Zealand birds. It is illustrated by stunning paintings by Paul Martinson, who, amazingly, is self-taught. His birds are lovingly detailed and overflowing with personality, showing plainly how much New Zealand has lost.

I see Martinson has also illustrated a smaller book on rare and threatened birds. And that he does expressive paintings as well!