Meet the maker: artist Amelia Guild
Artist Amelia Guild lives in no ordinary setting: home is a cottage on a 4250-hectare beef, sheep and deer high country station beneath towering hills and mountains.
It is this very home and surroundings that inspire the
34-year-old’s bold, abstract artworks.
High Peak Station near the tiny settlement, of Windwhistle, Canterbury, is where the artist and actress grew up, and where she has returned to raise her two young children, Willa and Rollo, with her beekeeper husband Tom Dunbar.
This landscape with its rustling pines and towering mountains is Guild’s creative inspiration, along with the cattle roaming the hills and plains.
Since first picking up a paintbrush at Rangi Ruru Girls School in Christchurch 18 years ago, she has been painting cattle.
But her cows are never black and white – the gently grazing cattle are transformed on her canvas into vivid blues, greens, and other colourful hues.
‘‘I like to create art that is fun and pretty.’’
She also paints portraits of sheep, horses and dogs – the latter also inspiring her work as an actress, her other great love.
Right now, Guild spends any time she has in the 10 square metre studio near her house, painting frantically for her next exhibition in May. It’s a romantic setting: the drawers storing her canvases were salvaged from the Mount Hutt School art department and were so heavy they had to be transported into her studio by forklift.
‘‘I use cattle and farm animals as a vehicle for my own painterly exploration. I love colour so the way I interpret animals is a reflection of me,’’ she said.
Guild, an animal lover, has a dog, Wiri, a pet deer and a pony who are all part of the family.
Her family surround her: her parents are in the homestead, her middle brother, who farms the station, is in another house with his family, and her eldest brother also lives in a house on the station with his family.
‘‘I love living here. I love the feeling that no-one is around and the sense of space. I love raising my kids outdoors.’’
Her art is not political, and yet she wants to celebrate rural life, which she thinks gets a bad rap. ‘‘I feel so proud of rural New Zealand. The high country and where I live is my inspiration and yet I feel there is so much negative portrayal of what farmers are doing. I feel frustrated about some of the practices too but there is also so much to celebrate.’’ Fonterra commissioned her to make four large paintings and 50 prints for its offices around the world. That led to her being picked up by The Artists Room in Dunedin, which will stage her May exhibition.
With a mix of rural and urban buyers, along with some from overseas, she says: ‘‘Dogs and cattle seem to have universal appeal.’’
Growing up, Guild showed signs of her future passion: she often made her own clothes without a pattern, and sold the earrings she made at a craft fair.
At high school, Guild wanted to be an actress, although she never felt comfortable enough to say that. ‘‘I whispered it once,’’ she recalls. Armed with a Bachelor of Arts, she headed for London, where she both acted and worked as an artist. A highlight was when she was employed as expedition artist on a documentary about a tea expedition to India.
‘‘I was sketching mobs of goats on busy streets. It was an incredible three months.’’
More recently, Guild has delved into life drawing, painting portraits of her pregnant girlfriends. ‘‘It’s another exploration of the living form. I never want my subjects to look stiff and stilted,’’ she says.