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Vicki Axtens - Aotearoa Artist

Vicki Axtens

Vicki Axtens - Aotearoa Artist

I have always had an interest and love of art, particularly painting. I remember vividly as a child, forever with a sketch book in my hand. My parents were always replacing my felt tip pens, pencils and eventually buying watercolour paints and loads of paint by number sets. I left school at 18 years old and then worked in an office for four years. I married at 22 and went on to have our children. Not long after I realised I missed the creative side of my life and still needed to have a pencil or paint brush in my hand. It almost just feels a part of you. So with a six month old baby in my arms, I set out to buy my first set of oil paints, table easel and a lovely little canvas pad. Seven years later, in 2004, I had my website developed, which was also the year I had my first solo exhibition. Living in a rural area near Rotorua and Taupo, there is always natural beauty all around me. Therefore this is where I focus on my subject matter. It is very inspiring to live surrounded in such beauty. I particularly love the end of the day – twilight – for taking photos. The warm light is just beautiful and intensifies the colours of the flora and fauna so much. I have learnt from many artist’s over the years, many different things about painting, whether it be a new colour mixture, or a way to look at a painting differently, even how to approach a subject. One of my great loves is Bouguereau, a well known 19th century amazing French artist. I fell in love with his paintings of women and children, his execution of painting fabrics, the attention to detail is fascinating. See Vicki’s work HERE.

Rochelle Boult - Aotearoa Artist

Rochelle Boult

FREE SPIRIT

Watching unlimited possibilities unfold onto paper, Rochelle Boult’s free spirit finds itself at the tip of a sharpened pencil. Finding peace and relaxation within her mark making, she builds her line and tone gently, observing her drawing as it gradually grows in depth and detail using shading and clever use of the different softnesses of her medium.

Rochelle creates works with Faber-Castell thick Graphite on Bockingford Drawing paper. Starting with an HB which she uses to sketch the outline, she then moves through from a 2B for shading to a 6B and an 8B for final depth. Rochelle also does some printmaking including etching and woodcuts, which she has successfully sold in a Marlborough exhibition.

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Kristin Ivill

Kristin Ivill

JOINING THE DOTS

Written and photographed by John Botton.

I first met Kristin Ivill when she breezed into my studio clutching a portfolio folder full of artworks she wanted to get copied and printed. While pouring over her work, it took me some time to realise that the exquisite images were made of thousands of dots, dots of all shapes, dots of all sizes, dots of all hues. My only point of reference was to imagine that the dots were like pixels in a photograph. I went along to Kristin’s studio to see if she was indeed going dotty.

JB: “Give me a little background to your beginnings in art and your training?”

“I’ve always loved art. My mother was arty and my grandmother was quite crafty. She spun wool. She dyed wool and wove fabrics. My grandmother would take me around the farm and we’d go hunting for birds and bugs and look at the trees and she would tell me all about the native fauna and flora. So that’s where my love of birds and nature stems from. I did art at school until year eleven when my art teacher told me to give it up. She said I had no talent. So I stopped doing it and focused on art history in year twelve which I loved. That’s where I was exposed to Seurat who did pointillism. But that was the end of that so I left art and got married and had children. When my daughter was born I did a bit of painting again because we needed some art to fill the walls. I got some canvases and paint and just started painting and it went from there.”

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Jamie Mackman - Aotearoa Artist

Jamie Mackman

 

mug-shot-catherine-dunn-aotearoa-artistFIGURATIVELY SPEAKING

“I guess the galaxy just aligned for me that night in 1989 when I was born,” is why Jamie Mackman thinks she became an artist. She is a young Wellington artist who just loves the human form. We think it’s her undeniable talent as well.

I have always been the kid who made ridiculous clothes for their dolls, or vehicles with too many flashing lights for their action figures. When I wasn’t running about outside like a crazed animal with my sister I was hiding away inside a blanket tent talking to myself about some amazing idea for building something. Being an artist I guess is just a certain way of thinking and using your brain. I am a problem solver, I get a kick out of thinking far outside the square and trying to find solutions to the questions that need a creative mind to solve them. Finding what visually or verbally stimulates you to stay sane in a world that bears so much beauty and consequently constant destruction of that beauty. 

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Catherine Dunn

mug-shot-catherine-dunn-aotearoa-artistI don’t remember a time when I didn’t make art. It has been with me from the beginning. One of my earliest memories of being given an opportunity to paint was on my first day at kindergarten. It was a momentous discovery at the time for me and I didn’t want to do anything else.

Art was always a favourite subject at school, which led me to study art fulltime in Australia. I attended Claremont School of Art in Perth, Western Australia in the early 90s and graduated after three years, majoring in Sculpture. It was a lifetime ago and a valuable experience, fraught with all the learning curves of youth of course, but definitely provided a solid base to build on, and great memories. After Art school in my 20s I meandered through the creative process a bit, mostly in a sleep deprived fog, due to the addition of a husband and children. I always tried to keep my hand in while running a busy household and raising a family and continued to exhibit in Australia and in New Zealand, but it is only now that two out of three of my children are out into the world and doing their own thing, and my husband has miraculously morphed into a fulltime Picture Framer, that I have the opportunity to really work as a fulltime artist.

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Annette Straugheir

 

annette-straughier-aotearoa-artistCREATIVE FREEDOM

Wellington born of Dutch heritage, Annette Straigheir passed art in secondary school and has attended many art courses and workshops over the years. Still fully employed, she enjoys her painting as a secondary focus, although she thoroughly enjoys the freedom of creativity she finds in her art.

Finding time to paint has been her biggest obstacle, but she’s found the formula of making it a priority of her ‘at home’ time and she tries really hard not to procrastinate or get side tracked. Having deadlines helps to keep her focussed. Art is Annette’s passion and watercolour her favourite medium. She loves the transparency and looseness watercolour offers and says she does not find that as easy to achieve with other mediums. However, she is finding a lot of success with acrylic as well. “I enjoy the process of being immersed in creating a piece of artwork. The beauty of nature is my biggest inspiration, sunsets, sunrises, landscapes, flowers and people.”

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Angela Mole

Angela Mole - Aotearoa Artist

I was destined to become an artist - having drawn, painted, sewn and crafted constantly throughout my growing years. After gaining a History and English degree I became a primary school teacher, encouraging the children in artistic expression at every opportunity and displaying their art in every available space. I was commended for the ambience but warned that too many ‘hangings’ could pose a fire risk! Later I co-ordinated the installation of large permanent outdoor murals which met with approval. On retiring from teaching, once my family had grown, I was at last free to follow my own artistic journey.

I am largely self-taught but value the grounding and increased confidence attained by completing a diploma in painting in 2011. These days I feel compelled to create positive vibrant images. My brief as an artist is to “Focus on the beauty which is abundant in this world and thereby know peace” (Philippians 4:8-10, from the Holy Bible). One part of my inspiration is what I see as beauty, most often the smallest organic forms in nature - seeds, shells, eggs, petals and leaves, small beginnings from which greater things evolve. Equally important, is how I feel. I paint from the heart and am translating thoughts, words, poems and dreams into painted expression. I have an overwhelming desire to inject colour, truth and beauty into our environment, trying to counter the negative, dark influences pervading society. It’s about spreading a little happiness. Japanese style (the combination of minimalism and fine detail present in paper and silk design) influences my painting as do the swirling curves and clean lines from the Art Nouveau era.

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Karen Taylor

karyntaylor-aotearoa-artistBorn an artist, Karen Patricia Taylor has always had a fascination with the human form which is often an integral element to her work. Driven by an intrinsic force where her creativity finds a happy balance within the flow of her artistic making, her work speaks of the feminine amongst a myriad of other creative explorations. Her early life was spent drawing and making, often copying faces from comics, “pages and pages of them” until this grew to include the human form.

By the time she was in her late 20’s she began to work with clay, primarily cut and altered slip cast objects. Slip cast objects are created when liquid clay (slip) is poured into plaster moulds and allowed to form a layer, the cast is left on the inside cavity of the mould and taken out and altered or added to as required.

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Julie Freeman

Julie Freeman - aotearoa artist

A self-taught artist, Julie Freeman has always loved art as a hobby. When she moved overseas after marriage in 1980, she was able to pursue her art while her husband Michael was completing a Masters in Product Design at the University of Illinois. She began doing animal portraits and some figurative work, which gradually progressed from black and white to colour. After living in the USA for eight years they transferred to the UK. Life was pretty busy with two young children but she persevered, mainly doing commissioned animal portraits, which became popular through word of mouth. Julie tells us of her journey from then through to winning the 2016 Unison Colour Cup at the PANZ ‘Purely Pastel’ National Awards in Mapua.

We returned to New Zealand at the end of 1993, and my primary focus was on the children, the home and part-time work in a local art shop. As the children got older I had a little more free time and started to focus on pastel as my preferred medium. My first exhibition was with two other professional artists, Merle Bishop and Joan Taylor, at A Fine Line Gallery in Matakana in December 2009 which was a turning point for me as an artist. My work for this exhibition covered a range of subjects, focusing on what I thought would be popular with the local residents and I successfully sold the majority of my work.

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Alfred Memelink

Alfred Memelink - aotearoa artist

Within the delicate touch of watercolour, Alfred Memelink’s love and admiration of the sea is clearly visible. His joy and wonder in the environments he portrays are clear in the lightness and pleasure of his colour range and composition which emits a sense of satisfaction and contentment. With an easy brushstroke, one gets a feeling of comfort almost giving us permission to forgive nature its dark side with its wondrous and supple beauty. Even his stormy works have a feeling of softness and fragility, yet evoke inspiration.

Self taught, while at sea, his work was developed whilst sailing between New Zealand and Japan, working as a marine engineer. Giving credit to the Pacific Ocean and King Neptune, he began an artistic journey alongside the one he was already on. Having already had an early introduction with a childhood flavoured with artistic parents and wanting a hobby during his voyaging, watercolour was the practical decision to begin his artistic endeavours. A leisurely diversion from the practicalities of living, these early exercises and a book, ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’ led to the decision in 1994 to leave the sea to paint full time and get ready for his first solo exhibition in a local cafe.

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