Alistair McDonald
New Zealand Landscapes – Oils
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity (Giacometti)
Our landscape is a gift – most of the colours and shapes, a series of gorges and bowls shaped by ice and water, never far from the sea, with few flat horizons and the land (visually) bossing the sky.
It’s a dynamic landscape too – Ruamoko, the unborn restless earthquake/volcano god, making his earth mother Papatuanuku “subject to geological change without notice” (Durrant) and his angry teenage brother Tawhiri wearing her down with wind and storm.
Which is an invitation to move the shapes and colours around and change what’s there, as Nature does.