Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Scaling her own mountains
Sarah Hillary remembers family holidays near Wanaka, climbing the relatively benign Mt Maude.
"I seem to remember it had a wonderful cave near the top, which we used to love going into as children. It was very exciting," she says.
The Mt Maude in Hillary's new show at Anna Miles Gallery is a copy of part of Rita Angus' Mt Maud, done on an ancient pipi shell collected from a beach at Whangarei Heads. What is different from many of the other mountains featured in the show, all sourced from paintings by 20th-century New Zealand artists, is that it has the "right" name.
The mountain in Mt Cook, which draws on a familiar Rita Angus painting of a bare tree at Lake Wanaka, is probably Treble Cone. The Cook is a reference to Angus' married name. Angus is also the source of Mt Rita, which samples her painting of the railway station at Cass.
Hillary thus joins a line of homage - which includes Julian Dashper, Peter Peryer and Dane Mitchell - to a work voted New Zealand's greatest painting in a 2006 poll conducted by television arts programme Frontseat.
NZ Herald August 16 ¶ 10:57 pm
"I seem to remember it had a wonderful cave near the top, which we used to love going into as children. It was very exciting," she says.
The Mt Maude in Hillary's new show at Anna Miles Gallery is a copy of part of Rita Angus' Mt Maud, done on an ancient pipi shell collected from a beach at Whangarei Heads. What is different from many of the other mountains featured in the show, all sourced from paintings by 20th-century New Zealand artists, is that it has the "right" name.
The mountain in Mt Cook, which draws on a familiar Rita Angus painting of a bare tree at Lake Wanaka, is probably Treble Cone. The Cook is a reference to Angus' married name. Angus is also the source of Mt Rita, which samples her painting of the railway station at Cass.
Hillary thus joins a line of homage - which includes Julian Dashper, Peter Peryer and Dane Mitchell - to a work voted New Zealand's greatest painting in a 2006 poll conducted by television arts programme Frontseat.
NZ Herald August 16 ¶ 10:57 pm
