Gallery offers online tour
An exhibition showing a different side to one of New Zealand’s best-known artists will be available online this week.
The New Zealand Portrait Gallery celebrates 30 years, and is ensuring people can still get their art fix from home.
Years ago gallery founders Judy and Bill Williams contacted notable Kiwi artist Bill Sutton, who died in 2000.
Curator Maria Brown unearthed a letter in the Christchurch Art Gallery, in which the founders suggested the idea of a national portrait gallery, to which Sutton replied it was ‘‘a good idea’’.
This letter features as part of the exhibition, suitably titled A Good Idea.
Brown never intended the exhibition to come to fruition, let alone make it online; she created the plan as part of her postgraduate studies in curatorship at Canterbury University.
During her internship at the Christchurch Art Gallery, which owns Sutton’s estate, she helped with the organising and creation of a database of all Sutton’s papers.
‘‘There were so many papers, so I found the files for all his portraits, all the notes from people who wanted portraits.’’
When she discovered the connection between Sutton and the gallery’s founders, she got in touch with the portrait gallery.
Despite Sutton being known for his landscapes of rolling Canterbury Plains and golden fields, his portraits were also beautiful.
‘‘It’s a really good opportunity for the public, if they like Bill Sutton’s landscapes, to see another side of him,’’ Brown said.
The public talk about the exhibition was cancelled under the new Covid-19 restrictions on social gatherings.
Instead, photographs and footage were taken of the exhibition on March 19 and Brown provided a curator’s commentary for the video, ‘‘making some points like why I put that painting there . . . why I selected that painting’’. ‘‘I believe in seeing the paintings in the flesh, but seeing the video is the second best alternative.’’
Gallery director Jaenine Parkinson was editing the video as we spoke, herself in selfisolation.
‘‘I haven’t seen the exhibition, so I am experiencing this solely through Maria’s guided tour, and I’m finding it fascinating.’’
The online guided tour is in seven short parts, totalling about 20 minutes of content.
The guided tour video is on YouTube and linked on their website, along with slide shows for people to view the works at their own pace.