Media

New Zealand born artist Ruth Reid, is passionate about painting, exploring, sharing and protecting wilderness areas. She started life as one of a large family on a small farm not far from Geraldine, in rural New Zealand. Her family was fairly self-reliant at a time when it was considered to be necessary and normal.
They owned a bach at a local river with an outdoor hand-operated water pump and no electricity which formed the basis of her enduring love of the simple life, self-sufficiency and for the fabulous New Zealand outdoors. She skis and tramps in remote areas of the mountains and has great pleasure seeing her family continuing to enjoy the great outdoors too.
Although she completed an Arts Certificate at the Aoraki Polytechnic in 1987, married life on a farm with three children and a job in education left little time to pursue this interest. However, through those years she was waiting for the time and place to really ‘have a go’ at exploring the joys of painting as a career and looked forward to using her late father’s historic art equipment. Unsurprisingly, some of her siblings are artists too.
While living in North Yorkshire in the UK in 2006, she joined a group of watercolourists and continued painting on her return to New Zealand. Time was ticking on when the series of major earthquakes in Christchurch beginning in 2010 changed things for Ruth - and for many others. She now had the unexpected ‘opportunity’ of extra time to pursue art as a full-time career.
RuthReidArt.com website was set up and she made a huge self-imposed commitment to attempt ‘100 Paintings in 100 Days’ with the goal of sharpening her skills and style. This resulted in publicity through radio, TV and newspaper article’s which put the pressure on her to complete the project. Fortunately, as she said “I survived.”

See more about Ruth here.

Subscribe Today

With a Bachelor of Design, majoring in Illustration, from Massey University in Wellington, Rachel Walker says she probably chose the arts to annoy her parents in true teenage style. But the joke is on her, because she has evolved into an extremely talented artist who is paying the rent with her work.
“I started my degree thinking I wanted to be a graphic designer, then changed to textile designer. Slowly my tutors and I found that I was most skilled and excited when it came to the hand-drawn arty projects. So I ended up majoring in illustration, and after I finished university I was invited to display at a gallery, and things just kept moving in that direction.”
Rachel always keeps a notebook with her along with a camera to capture those moments of inspiration, which just pop up out of nowhere. Quite often these moments belong in the natural world, driven by that floaty, effortless beauty. She is saddened by the habitat loss and extinction of so many animal species.
Motivated by the likes of English painter, Lorna Holdcroft and Australian watercolourist, John Lovett, Rachel has always been a huge fan of Ralph Steadman’s loose, crazy style. “I like looking back over my work and seeing the style change and improve. It’s nice to feel like I’ve added some small amount of beauty to the world and hearing how happy people are with a piece of mine in their living room. I also like staying out late and not setting my alarm if I choose! Artists seem to be able to get away with things.”
Rachel is driven to improving her work, so much so that she keeps moving her goal posts. She finds her biggest obstacle is doubting herself and whether her work is good enough for exhibition. “Sometimes I think a painting is a complete failure, but if I put it away for a few weeks then drag it out again with fresh eyes, it can be fixed. Or at the very least chopped up and made into Christmas cards.”

See more about Rachel here.

Subscribe Today

I was unhappy with my cycle of meaningless employment when an artist girl-friend dared me to come up with a painting in one week – so I painted an abstract work on an old roll up canvas window blind, outside on the concrete veranda of my run down ancient inner city villa in Christchurch.
As I was doing this, the wind blew up briefly and the still wet painting was covered with needle-like leaves from an overhanging Totara tree, these stuck to the surface and looked great to my untrained eye and it felt significant as my childhood was on a farm called Totaradale. When the week was up I blindfolded and led her into the room where the painting was hanging and her reaction was just the impetus I needed, the beginning of my belief. I sold my house and gave it my full-time attention.
I had to move towards something that at least (if clumsily) attempted to tap into some authenticity. The idea appeals to me on many levels, anything I do or say, wear or collect can be excused because there is societal acceptance of eccentricity for artists. I can attempt to stand outside, disrobe or investigate the masks I, and others wear. I have friends who are writers, who can express themselves through words, ideas and feelings. From me, it just sounds clumsy. But with paint, sculpture or whatever, I can use intensely felt but abstract, even to me, concepts and put them out there to be reacted to or ignored by the viewer. It’s an opportunity to remind others and mostly myself of what has been forgotten, which is pretty much everything.
I live at the edge of Banks Peninsula beside Lake Wairewa (Forsyth) The land our home and studio sits on - Te Mata Hapuku - was part of a Maori settlement, and out the kitchen window, across the lake is Oruaka Pa. It’s a windswept volcanic landscape that has witnessed a long pre-European settlement with all its joys and troubles. This and the accumulation of all my past experiences has seeped in and oozes out onto my canvas, in ways that I can’t, to my satisfaction, verbally express, but I can at least try to do so with paint.

Follow Michael here.

Subscribe Today

As far back as I can remember, right from when I was very young, I have always had some art project on the go, whether it be a pencil drawing of a cartoon character, some amazing princess in a fantasy land, or a painting of landscapes using my basic little watercolour painting palette and brushes. As a child, art was my ‘go to’ if there was any spare time to fill. I have fond memories of sketch pad and pencil in hand, trying to capture the scenery that passed by as my family and I boated along the canals in Holland.
Art has continued to be my ‘go to’ throughout my life, in fact I would go as far as to say that without the ability to be creative, my life would not be balanced, as art to me is a wonderful way to completely relax; it is a chance to escape, and to be transported to the place I am creating.
There have been stages where travel, running a business and caring for my children when they were little, did not allow any time for creativity; however around twenty years ago, when our youngest started going to kindergarten, I had this strong urge to do something for myself and this is when I remembered what fundamentally made me tick - it was art and creativity of course.
As New Zealand has the most amazing scenery it became clear to me that I wanted to recreate these beautiful landscapes, but I wanted to do this well, so off I went and enrolled in a Water colour painting evening class with the Waikato Society of Arts. From watercolour classes I moved to Acrylic painting classes, as even-though I thoroughly enjoyed creating water colour paintings, I felt the need to do large scale more complex paintings, and I wanted to have the ability to blend colours and create more dramatic scenes.
See more about Henriette here.

Subscribe Today

Vivian Grapentin always enjoyed art as a little girl, winning some school prizes, but after the sad passing of her second child, who was only three, due to a brain tumour, she turned to painting as a way to manage her grief.

Born in Malaysia, Vivian’s studies in Lincoln Nebraksa were interrupted by the sweet allure of love and marriage. Before leaving for Cape Town she had completed a BSc in Interior Design. “I did not complete my dual degree in Fine Arts and changed it to a minor in Arts instead in 2001. So as far as art training went I studied Art History, Drawing 101 and 102, Printmaking and Graphic Design but not painting, which I am currently doing.”

Her first painting was of her eldest daughter, with her fairy wings in the garden, from a photo taken at her birthday party, and this sold online to a patron from New York. Soon after the sale of this work, Vivian and her family moved to New Zealand. Due to the upheaval of relocation (again) and having more children, she managed only two paintings in the following seven years. At the end of 2015, after unsuccessful attempts to get a visa for her sickly father-in-law to visit New Zealand, she decided to paint animal portraits as a way of making some extra money to enable her family of seven to fly to Cape Town to see him. Unfortunately he passed away before they made it there. “I’d like to think that his legacy, as well as my daughter’s, lives on through my paintings as they were the inspiration to begin it in the first place.”

See Vivian's web page here: http://www.vgrapentin-art.com/ .

Subscribe Today

When you ask Michael Yewen: “Have you any particular artistic ambitions?”, he answers ”Just to save the world, have fun creating art with cool people and make a living from that. When something amuses me, I think of a funny scenario. Like lots of dogs all in driverless cars barking at each other out of control at the traffic lights. Then I toy with some ways to present it. Often the first scenarios I see in my mind are like a Peter Jackson movie, so I then need to greatly simplify them to create something that I can complete in a reasonable amount of time.”

Michael has had no formal art training, and credits the many Art School Taupo events that he has been to for his artistic know-how. However, he was always an artist – “I was a real pain to the teachers. I recall several times going to the teacher when I was five and asking that she get us some better paints that were not just water, and brushes that were not just straw, and canvas that was not a sack. I clearly stated that it was not good enough and how did they expect me to paint with this. In the end I gave up - we are talking about five years old here – and I suspect the artist in me died a bit. But it was unstoppable and re-emerged when I hit my early 20s, with vengeance. Sessions of drawing dragons while groups of people watched really inspired me as a young artist. It was largely the attention of the other people that really got me going. I had drawn plenty of dragons by myself in my room, so these were well practiced. “One of my motivating factors for pursuing a career as an artist is how much I enjoy colour and sound. I like getting ‘sunshine out of a tube’ on a rainy day. That’s how I see yellow paint. The opportunity to interact with amazing people like other artists and large numbers of people via my art are other reasons, and the chance to influence people with my environmental causes. I have to maintain a connection to nature and interestingly, I get energy from creating. These days I create pretty much all day when I’m not researching or learning.

Contact Michael here: Trooder

Subscribe Today

Having studied at Whitecliffs School of Art – Diploma in landscape, Summer Schools at University – Diploma in figurative design and ATI Certificate for adult education, Loretta Arthur is still going strong.

She cannot remember when she didn’t draw or paint, however in the 1950s, there was no money to be had and she was encouraged to pursue secretarial and accounting work. Although there was no special training in art at St Mary’s College Christchurch, the school she attended, she always managed to receive the art prize.

Loretta became involved in theatre and created many sets for production as well as acting and directing, “Art was always there, sketching on the boat at Christmas, observing figures and the like. When my four children were at secondary school, I decided to become serious about my art.”

Finding immense inspiration from black and white studies, photos and sketches, enjoying the atmosphere created, she kept herself busy sketching and taking her own photos. Loretta maintains she sees potential paintings everywhere around her, in everyday life and all occasions, with her preferred subjects being people in various situations, at the beach or in cafés and historic or old buildings. Her current projects include trying different styles and doing research on various mediums. She is currently enjoying experimenting with Biro and is looking for more inspiration for acrylic work.

The artists who have provided the most inspiration for Loretta are Monet, John Turner and her art tutor, John Horner at Whitecliffs School of Art. “I love impressionist art and using the alla-prima technique, the freedom of just painting on a blank canvas with no preparation; sometimes it doesn’t work, most of the time it does. I find this very therapeutic and suggest all artists do this at least once a year, especially after a big commission. There is a lot to be gained from the peace and solitude of creating something on a blank canvas and calling it your own.” Contact Loretta on NZ (0064) (0)21 941 767.