painters-from-new-zealand

"Being an artist is submitting to the learning that comes from being a mother. It's all the better for the work in the end. It enriches your field of understanding of human nature, all the hards bits and the good bits, the whole thing...Ultimately, the way forward is to be grateful for the blessings that come from accepting those challenges."

"I couldn't imagine painting anyone I didn't like. When people do appear in my paintings, they're always people for whom I have a special feeling."

"When you're painting, nobody else knows what you're doing and you're the only one who understands it. You've got to have faith in what you're doing and in humanity."

"[A] painting presents its own battle, its own requirements. And a print is never a reproduction of a painting. It makes its own demands, it has its own life, its own thing going for it."

"More and more, we are being required to know what are the implications of living in a society that is increasingly diverse through the arrival of immigrants from all walks of life and very different parts of the planet. I would like to think that our work is a tangible example of what people can achieve when they work together."

"A consistent thread in my work is that it’s made in response to place, and what’s happening around me – physical and social environments provide the raw material, the inspiration, the starting point."

"They become a body not a person, then just an image not an image of a person."

"When you're painting you feel quite attune with everything... it's a great pleasure, quite addictive."

"I felt very strongly about feminism and photography better expressed my political ideals."

"I might refer to the female now, but she is always active, symbolic of female action and although painted in a sensual style, she is not up for sale, not offered to the viewer. This is one of the reasons I started using animals."

"I don't want to work unless there is some meaning that by painting I can communicate something personal and political. A painting is ambiguous, very sensuous and has to come from your core."

"Art is a structure of symbols, and those people who do not comprehend that language will pass it by."

"It was too hard to be a feminist artist on your own; the criticism was too great to bear."

"I think I would have been more successful, but less interesting."

"I have never lost my faith in my painting, my work, as a child or an adult, in sickness or health, success or failure, peace or war ..."

"I haven't any desire for success or the limelight, and no further wish to explain myself. Neither do I wish to play, any more than I can help, a part in the world of petty tyranny, greed and murder, and war ... My pacifism and my paintings are now closely linked."

"I live alone to work ... My friends are very few now, but more quality. Friends, family and works of art are the only reasons why I live."

"It's all there, the strangeness, colour, exhilaration."

"I've tried through the medium of paint to express ... how simple and wonderful living is ..."

"I have been able to devote my energies to what I really am, a woman painter. It is my life."

"I am still trying to express ... the vast variations & endless possibilities in paint."

"I, as other painters do, live to paint and paint to live."

"I paint colour as a woman sees and hears..."

"In describing a town in Morocco, Tétouan: "The whiteness and pearliness of the town simply defies you-you can't get it pure and brilliant enough and the shadows drive one silly-you race after them , pause one frenzied moment to decide on a blue mauve yellow or green shadow-when up and over the wall and away and the wretched things gone for that day at least and you are gazing at a glaring blank wall and wondering why on earth you ever started to sketch it.""

"But au fond-deep in my work-I am steadfast and steady as a rock... My present work is consistent-I shall sink or swim by it-I think swim-."

"Painting reduces me to tears and misery: peaks of ecstasy, depths of disillusion..."

"To her brother, August 1940: "My aspect of the family talent, or curse? has taken the form of a deep intellectual experience, a force which has given me no rest or peace but infinite joy and sometimes even rapture.""

"So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be"

"this is the one I love.he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been"

"we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces"

"how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words"

"when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof."

"To Dorothy Kate Richmond, 1903: "Come to Tetuan. Come—catch the next steamer, cancel all engagements, chuck the studio let everything go to the winds only come without a moment's delay and value for yourself all the dreams of beauty colour and sunshine...""

"1895: "I am slowly settling down to an oldmaidship, and I have only one prominent idea and that is that nothing will interfere between me and my work.""

"1912: "I was born in Dunedin; we were an English family in a Scottish settlement.""

"It is one of the tragedies of leaving Home—New Zealand is too far away—it ceases to be real. New Zealanders like myself cannot help becoming de-nationalized—they have no country—it is sad—but true ... Art is like that—it absorbs your whole life and being. Few women can do it successfully. It requires enormous vitality. That is my conception of genius—vitality.""

"To her mother, 1921: "Don't let N Zealand wait to put up a memorial tablet to my memory—let her help me now whilst I am working at work that I hope will live after me.""

"My interest in the way these writers are portrayed in the media began * when I started a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University, in 2009. I realised that even though some of them were challenging ethnic stereotypes with their work, they were often completely exoticised in the media around them."

"The voices belong to some of Aotearoa’s foremost writers: Tusiata Avia, Tina Makereti, Chris Tse, Paula Morris, and Karlo Mila, among many others, who I’ve interviewed for my upcoming book, The Outliers: Who do we want to be?"

"And the city of Troy is Pākehā culture, which I envisage in this book as a walled fortress. In front of this fortress, the horse is taking shape. There are voices clamouring inside it, about to be let out."

"Wellington, with its hills and fault lines and glittering sea, is like a perfect espresso cup of culture and energy. It’s also home to a lot of quiet minorities, like the Greek community I come from, who carry stories that might be less well known than others. I can’t wait to return"

"But, in this story, the Trojan Horse is a non-fiction book that I’m writing about the media in Aotearoa — and the warriors are writers. Māori writers, Pasifika writers, French and Chinese and “other” writers. Any writers that haven’t been identified by the press as part of a Pākehā mainstream."

"I am a Greek-New Zealand writer and I am building a horse like this — or, more accurately, I’m allowing it to build itself."

"In the story of the Trojan Horse, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks pretend to sail away and leave a “gift” of a wooden horse on the doorstep of the city of Troy. The Trojans pull the horse into their city. But, under the cover of night, a select force of men creep out of it, torching the city, and thus winning the war for the Greeks."

"I discovered that — contrary to what I’d expected — in the 40 years since the publication of Witi Ihimaera’s first book, the mainstream media’s representation of these authors has not become more nuanced, or less racist. Instead, the racism has gone underground, coming out as a kind of simplistic “celebration”, and keeping all such authors firmly on the outside: nice, exotic additions to “New Zealand Literature."