Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Visual Arts
The NZ 'can do' attitude extends to the visual arts. If you're visiting a local's home don't
be surprised to find one of the owner's paintings on the wall or one of their mate's sculp-
tures in the back garden, pieced together out of bits of shell, driftwood and a length of the
magical 'number-eight wire'.
This is symptomatic of a flourishing local art and crafts scene cultivated by lively ter-
tiary courses churning out traditional carvers and weavers, jewellery-makers, multimedia
boffins, and moulders of metal and glass.
The larger cities have excellent dealer galleries representing interesting local artists
working across all media. Not all the best galleries are in Auckland or Wellington. The en-
ergetic Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (
Click here
)
- home to the legacy of sculptor and film-
maker Len Lye - is worth a visit to New Plymouth in itself.
Traditional Maori art has a distinctive visual style with well-developed motifs that have
been embraced by NZ artists of every race. In the painting medium, these include the cool
modernism of Gordon Walters and the more controversial pop-art approach of Dick
Frizzell's
Tiki
series. Likewise, Pacific Island themes are common, particularly in Auck-
land. An example is the work of Niuean-born Auckland-raised John Pule.
It should not be surprising that in a nation so defined by its natural environment, land-
scape painting constituted the first post-European body of art. John Gully and Petrus van
der Velden were among those to arrive and paint memorable (if sometimes overdramatised)
depictions of the land.
A little later, Charles Frederick Goldie painted a series of compelling, realist portraits of
Maori, who were feared to be a dying race. Debate over the political propriety of Goldie's
work raged for years, but its value is widely accepted now: not least because Maori them-
selves generally acknowledge and value them as ancestral representations.
From the 1930s NZ art took a more modern direction and produced some of the coun-
try's most celebrated artists including Rita Angus, Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon.
McCahon is widely regarded to have been the country's most important artist. His paintings
might seem inscrutable, even forbidding, but even where McCahon lurched into Catholic
mysticism or quoted screeds from the Bible, his spirituality was r ooted in geography. His
bleak, brooding landscapes evoke the sheer power of NZ's terrain.
