Style: August 05, 2022

Style | Art 67
“New Zealand art that is
exciting, artistically,
is so often from the regions.
It is really rooted in
place with imagination
and creativity.”
It is an echo of New Zealand’s place at the bottom
of the world, isolated, giving it an independence
of thought and creativity and a strength of character,
he says.
“These artists go out into the wilderness to discover
who they are, to make their statement. New Zealand
draws that out of people. Places that offer galvanising
solitude, a sense of place and time.”
This is despite the perception of provincial New
Zealand as being small-minded conservative backwaters
or dull.
“New Zealand art that is exciting, artistically, is so
often from the regions. It is really rooted in place with
imagination and creativity.”
Gregory’s conclusions are based on nearly three
decades in the art world as a writer, painter and curator,
after starting out as a journalist in Auckland. He recently
published a book of his poems featuring his own
illustrations called House & Contents.
He has also written books on significant New Zealand
artists including Hotere, Graham Percy and Pat Hanly and
is on the home straight with what he calls a “monster” of
a book on Don Binney.
Binney has dominated his life for the past few years as
he put together the monograph and biography on the
artist, who died 10 years ago in September.
“Don Binney’s is by far [the] biggest book I’ve done in
my life.”
He was drawn to write the book as he felt Binney, like
the others he has written about – the pioneer generation
of modernist New Zealand artists – helped define his
interest in the arts from when he was young.
“Don Binney is almost the final one of that group [from]
when I was a teenager, that shook me up and around and
changed the way I saw the world.
“Binney spent his life putting this stylised modernist bird
in the sky above Aotearoa. When I was a kid, I found it
bracing and now I’m 60 I still find it bracing.”
Gregory also felt the questions Binney asked in his
paintings were similar to what he himself asked about art.
He had also spent time at Bethells Beach where Binney
did a lot of his painting. So it felt like unfinished business.
“He used the bird as his great motif to articulate the
questions: ‘where are we, what are we doing here? How
do we feel about this place? How do we see it? How do we
look after it? What is [the] past, present and future of it?”
ABOVE: Gregory O’Brien takes every opportunity to spend time in Central Otago.