Bay beaches feature in work
Scenes of Hawke’s Bay rivers and families enjoying the beach rank highly in Ion Brown’s painting preferences and feature in the paintings being exhibited at Red Peach Gallery in Ahuriri in a new exhibition of his work.
The paintings have great charm, softly rendered with impressionistic touches of colour, they record moments that brought him pleasure in his own life with his family at the beach or playing in the rivers.
Brown paints in oils, frames his own work and makes furniture. Now in his later years he paints for leisure, however it has not always been that way.
He came to live in Napier on Hospital Terrace in 1963, having grown up in Dunedin where he had learnt his painting and craft skills and started an engraving business. Painting was a lower priority then, but when the time was right his wife Sylvia took over the running of the engraving business while he focused fulltime on painting.
This led to an interesting period when in 1987 Ion Brown was appointed Official Artist to the New Zealand Army. This commission continued until 1997 and during this decade he
travelled widely with the army to record its history in many of its fields of operation, especially the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign for which he was commissioned to paint The Battle of Chunuk Bair which now hangs in Parliament building, Wellington.
Since then Ion has continued to pursue his own style and passionately enjoys painting New Zealand’s people going about their work and leisure, capturing the special light and atmosphere that the New Zealand landscape provides.
He describes his painting style as ‘impressionistic’ but his very early work was detailed still life, almost like the Dutch Masters’ style of painting.
“I worked myself out of that, I needed a licence to be ‘boldly wrong’,” he said. “To find things out of the ordinary. By loosening up I do things I think are wonderful, but this wouldn’t happen if I gave it too much consideration.”