Menu

Nature

Featured-lui-peti-aotearoa-artist

Lui Peti

lui-peti-aotearoa-artistLui Peti’s art is surrealistic, emotive and a little quirky. His digital paintings are available to be enjoyed by everyone, with his original work sold online as affordable art prints. His hope is for people to enjoy his art as much as he enjoys creating it. With buyers already in Australia, the USA and Canada, Lui is well on his way to becoming a full-time artist.

I love being able to visualise my thoughts and being able to create art from a process of thinking. I like pushing myself to be braver and reach deeper into my psyche to explore its essence. Perfecting my craft and being surprised by my progress is very satisfying. 

Read More
Empowered-tessa-ralston-aotearoa-artist

Tessa Ralston

tessa-ralston-aotearoa-artistINSPIRED ILLUSTRATION

I’ve come to find that art seems to always niggle it’s way back into my life, even, perhaps, when I’m trying to distance myself from it. I have no true recollection of ‘getting into art’, but like most children inherently are, I was drawn to painting and visual expression.

With my mother being a graphic designer, I was fortunate enough that she fostered my artistic energy and patiently encouraged my creativity – and amusingly, she simultaneously firmly discouraged my entering the graphic design world. I believe there is a subtle divergence that happens when artists are ‘made’, and that is when they keep drawing, painting and playing after they are no longer children.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Studio High Res-sally-ann-davies-aotearoa-artist

Sally-Ann Davies

Sally-Ann Davies was born in Shropshire, England and resides in Taupo. She started her journey of becoming an artist as a toddler, drawing on the newly wallpapered walls of the farmhouse she grew up in. Her favourite subject at school without doubt was art. She vividly remembers that the primary school she attended would reward you if you finished your work early, with going and playing in the craft corner. She remembers how amazing creations developed with the simple materials such as egg cartons and toilet rolls. 

Her journey to becoming the esteemed artist she is today did not come with ease. A the age of 12 she had a detached retina so ended up having quite a few months off school. This meant no active play, which she says was very frustrating when you grow up on a farm with her brothers. Sally-Ann is a triplet, so you can understand the frustration she must have had, because she and her brothers normally spent their time building dens, rafts and camping by the river. 

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Featured-image-kristin-ivill-aotearoa-artist

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.”

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Resolve-catherine-dunn-aotearoa-artist

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.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Shaken-not-forsaken-angela-mole-aotearoa-artist

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.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Summer-winter-autumn-karyntaylor-aotearoa-artist

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.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More

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.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Tree Of Life-robert-van-der-touw-aotearoa-artist

Robert van der Touw

robert-van-der-touw-aotearoa-artistTHE PASSION IN PATTERN

Robert van der Touw arrived in New Zealand in 1990 after graduating from the School of Natural medicine in Holland. He always had a strong love for the beauty of nature, even as a four year old boy when he used to wander the Dutch forest and steal flowers and plants out of people’s gardens to put in his own. The police were not amused but were very surprised at his age! “Is that Robert van der Touw” one of them laughed as he entered the room! Roger tells us more of his interest in nature and accomplishing his mission.

Shortly after my arrival here I fell in love (literally) with the native forests of New Zealand. As a practitioner of natural medicine, nature was my ‘playing ground’ and New Zealand’s pristine ancient forests could not provide for a better one. I developed a sincere desire to explore all these beautiful ‘new medicines’. As a trained classical homeopath I was lucky. Homeopathy offers effective research methods to let you explore these.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More

Jill White

jill-white-aotearoa-artistFINDING THE SECRETS

I have had no formal art training but I come from a family of art lovers so I always say it must have been through a process of ‘osmosis’ that I learnt to work with colour.  Being surrounded by art in the home must have had some subconscious influence. My sister Loy Forrest was the artist in the family so until I came to New Zealand from Botswana, it wasn’t something I had considered doing.

Once I asked a friend’s daughter to do a painting for me but she was too busy so I thought I would try to do one myself. Another wonderful friend of mine Raewyn Coker saw it and took it into the local community gallery where it sold in the first week - they asked me to bring more work in to which I replied “but I’m not an artist and I don’t think I can”. However, I gave it a go and when that one sold, my career as an artist took off. Once I started painting I couldn’t stop, finding a need to create.

register and subscribe

Subscribe Today

Read More
Load More

You cannot copy content of this page

Back To Top
×Close search
Search