Outsider casts fresh light on Nelson landscape
Giant balls of coloured light hover over the Maitai Valley.
A little area of open ground behind Founder’s Park appears from multiple angles, glowing rose-pink, lemon-yellow, emeraldgreen.
Your eye tracks down through a stand of gums on Walters Bluff and suddenly, right in the middle of your descent, you’re in someone’s bright yellow bedroom.
There are paintings within paintings, scenes within scenes.
James Kirkwood’s new painting show at Nelson’s Quiet Dog Gallery is quite a trip.
The artist is a blow-in from up north. He was a Jafa until recently but grew up in Whanganui before forging an illustrious career as a painter, sculptor, sommelier and wine merchant in Auckland.
He won the inaugural BMW Art Award in 2005, has twice been a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards, and built an entire threetiered Chinese Pagoda for an outdoor sculpture show in 2013.
But before that, Kirkwood was an annoyingly gifted adolescent at Whanganui High School; a kid who could really draw when everyone else was just an inept scribbler. I know this because in the mid-70s, we were in the same class. We were close mates as teenagers, then lost touch, and now here he is, washing up in the same town and staging the best painting show I’ve seen in many moons.
Kirkwood made this work as a way of engaging with his new home. Walters Bluff: Outdoors for the Indoors showcases one man’s radical reworking of our local landscape, and it’s packed with visual thrills.
‘‘Someone asked me what style my paintings were,’’ he says. ‘‘I told them they were surrealistic local landscape bonbons. There’s something both odd and sweet about them, I guess . . .’’
Indeed. They are loose, bright, defiantly strange. There’s a playfulness there, a sense of adventure, as familiar Nelson landscapes are gate-crashed by ornate interior scenes of bedrooms and living rooms, often plonked right into the centre of the frame.
‘‘Well, the way I scan the landscape is very similar to the way I scan a room,’’ he says. ‘‘Your attention moves between prominent pieces and standout colours and focal points. In the same way as your eye moves from a tree to the sky to a rock outside, your eyes scan from a curtain to a chair to a table as they circle around a room.’’
A room resembles a purposefully constructed landscape, reckons Kirkwood, and you can read a lot about the occupant’s personality by how they’ve arranged that room.
‘‘I wanted to combine some famous interiors with my interest in landscapes and landscape design.’’
And so it is that bold, semi-abstracted renderings of rooms once inhabited by British photographer Cecil Beaton and renowned English interior decorator John Beresford Fowler are laid over local scenes Kirkwood visited when familiarising himself with his new home.
‘‘I moved here two years ago and started exploring this new place, trying to fit it in to my way of seeing things.’’
He went up the Grampians, the Maitai and Walters Bluff, carrying sketchbooks to record the landscapes from above. Kirkwood then went back to the studio in his tiny cottage, working up his favourite drawings in acrylics or gouache and turning them into paintings.
‘‘The tiny park you can see down through the trees from the top of Walters Bluff reminded me of a walking park in Tokyo, so I did multiple paintings of that. I painted the hillside, too, where you walk up this zig-zag with the trees closing over you like a cathedral. For my Canopy painting, I added John Fowler’s 1950s bedroom over the top because there’s a bed in that room that billows like those treetops. It worked!’’
Such unexpected visual associations add a jolt of surprise and intrigue to these works. The two large Maitai Beauty Spots paintings are another fine example.
‘‘I sketched those lovely hills up the Maitai Valley from the Centre of New Zealand, then added some balls of colour. When colour floats above a landscape like that, it increases the illusion of distance and depth.’’
In other works, Kirkwood makes connections between our local countryside and the great landscape painting tradition of Europe.
His painting Reddish features a cunning ‘‘surrealistic bon-bon’’ remix of French painter Nicholas Poussin’s famous 1651 work, Landscape With A Calm.
These are paintings overflowing with wit and style, made by a recent arrival who’s looking at our back yard with fresh eyes.
Kirkwood hopes the show might give local people a new way of thinking about their region.
‘‘When you arrive in a new place, you sometimes see things more clearly than people who’ve lived there a long time, then everything you see gets filtered through your own interests and subconscious associations.
‘‘You bring a different way of looking at a place when you come in as an outsider, and I also wanted to take a cheeky poke at the more outdated aspects of the landscape art tradition.
‘‘Making this show helped me feel a lot more grounded in this new place I now call home.’’
Walters Bluff: Outdoors for the Indoors by James Kirkwood is at The Quiet Dog Gallery, 33 Wakatu Lane until October 8.
‘‘You bring a different way of looking at a place when you come in as an outsider.’’ James Kirkwood