A rock-solid friendship of art and light
Virginia Winder
Two artist mates have found themselves between a rock and a heart place at New Plymouth’s Koru on Devon art gallery for much of March.
“Kiroo” Tom Mutch with and Australian Russell Austin’s are contrasting and complementary exhibitions that took each man about a year to paint.
Mutch, 72, who was born across the Tasman but spent decades living in New Zealand making art, has painted six big, bright and bold “portraits” of an exquisite rock he found by chance on Kūaotunu Beach, Coromandel.
“I was just lying in the dry sand and looked down and there was this rock and I couldn’t believe how it affected me. I thought that’s the universe’s way of saying ‘Tom, you have to go away and paint this rock’,” Mutch says.
“It maps the history of its layers and sediments in glorious colour.”
As do Mutch’s rock paintings, which he describes as being of the “colour field” style.
The rock of ages, which he can cradle in his hands, will be on display at the exhibition in the New Plymouth Gallery from March 8 to 25.
Austin, 52, who lives on the Central Coast of New South Wales, has painted 11 works based entirely on his brief impressions of Taranaki seen through fresh eyes.
He and wife Tamara Ngātoko stayed with Mutch in New Plymouth for three weeks in March 2023, and Austin absorbed the wild west coast landscape.
“The light was exceptional. The light was violet, clear, crisp. The sand, bronze and black. The trees as dark patterned silhouettes and the hills in layers of lime green. A total opposite to my home,” Austin writes in his artist statement.
The men met in Australia through art. Austin was working on a mural in Noraville, a suburb of the Central Coast, and Mutch was staying nearby so he could care for his elderly mother in a rest home.
The muralist remembers his first vision of Mutch.
“This fellow rides down on his pushbike wearing his helmet and all these spiky things hanging out to stop the magpies attacking him.”
The artists started talking and the next day Tom turned up with coffee.
“We just hit it off and became firm friends after that. He’s one of my best mates.”
Their conversations are based on life, art and making music with plenty of friendly ribbing.
After his trip to Taranaki, Austin went home and got to work.
“It’s all I have been thinking about for the last 12 months,” he says.
“I had to extend my studio when I [got] back from New Zealand so I could put together this show in a short amount of time. I’m usually a slow painter but when I’m pushed to it, I can surprise myself.”
His works, which include oil paintings of Taranaki Maunga, Hangatahua Awa (Stony River) and the wreck of the Gairloch, all have a surreal quality. There are faces in rocks and animal shapes formed by driftwood.
Observing a new environment with limited background information allows the immediate child-like response to flourish and absorb vistas, nooks and motifs, he says.
“From a young age I had an imagination that was pretty wild compared to the rest of my family.”
When he was 12 or 13 and at high school, Austin’s life changed because of just one teacher.
“I had a substitute teacher, this gorgeous
Greek woman, and she loved what I did and I thought ‘I think I’ve found my thing’ and from then on I didn’t stop.”
After school he spent two years doing a diploma at Hornsby Art College in Sydney, got married young, and along with his art, looked after their three boys, when his wife went back to work full-time. Their sons are now aged 29, 27 and 24.
He also teaches oil painting to students aged 16 to 85 at Gosford Gallery Studios, and also runs a weekly life-drawing class.
“I’m now the Greek goddess,” he says. “I’m going to be that good teacher who inspires them and encourages them to go off in their own directions.”
In Aotearoa, Mutch and wife Raywin Lim (now deceased) promoted many artists and created an annual arts festival at their Bird’s Nest Studio on the Coromandel Peninsula.
For a decade, they started each year with the event, showing works inside the studio and sculptures in the garden.
Mutch says about 400 people attended the festival openings and about 2000 people visited over three weeks.
The studio was at Kūaotunu, where he found the rock, which immersed him in interpretation through colour, a complete break away from his challenging works of a world gone mad.
“They were difficult works to make; political and scary. They got inside me and I began to despise God, religion and politics,” he says.
However, plenty of oil paintings in Mutch’s body of work are less foreboding and full of hope like his series on Superbird, a champion for nature, who also features in a trilogy of books written by the artist, and was transformed into an award-winning short animated video.
Working on the paintings for has been a joy for Mutch. “It was all about enjoying the colour, which was totally liberating.”
And meditative.
“I think I spent as much time observing what I had achieved each day as the time I took to paint them, which is quite different for me,” he says.
“I put them in the lounge and looked at them all night, thinking about how to approach the next day’s work.”
For the first time, Mutch painted straight on to his canvases, without any preliminary sketches.
“The work started telling me what to do rather than me telling the work what to do.”
So, Mutch’s celebration of colour and nature, and Austin’s first-time take on Taranaki are hanging alongside each other for a brief time, like shifting sands, but the works also mark the permanence of the land.