A Feeling For Landscape

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29898, 11 August 1962, Page 3

A Feeling For Landscape

The Far-away Hills. By M. T. Woollaston. Auckland Gallery Associates. 48 pp. Over the years Mr Woollaston’s paintings have made their own way and created their own admirers. They never fail to give an impression of quiet sincerity—a beautiful attribute, but one which does not usually appeal to people with a taste for bold colours and high style.

The same refinement of discrimination that marks his attitude to the painter’s problems, is now shown by Mr Woollaston in a different medium. He has just published what he calls "a meditation on New Zealand landscape," brief tn compass, but nevertheless a contribution to

anti-biographical writing in • this country "The Far-Away Hills" was first given orally as “the annual art lecture sponsored by the Auckland Gallery Associates and delivered tn the City Galleryon November 8. 19644” All honour to the Auckland Gallery Associates! Their choice of a speaker was discerning There is a pleasing 'heory that when artists lay down the brush and take up the pencil they are automatically able to write workmanlike prose. Some famous names could be mentioned in support of this notion; but by and large arists prefer to express themselves in their one chosen medium, life being too short to allow of excellence in two Mr Woollaston will be remembered as a painter; but it is also clear that if he cared to create a body of written work he could make his mark in tha‘ way as well. “The Far-Away Hills" is written in a simple graceful style, without a trace of literary pretentiousness After all, it could not be otherwise. The author has spent a lifetime in the consideration—sometimes sober, some-

times delighted—of landscape. Indeed his sub-title almost implies that he sees himself as a function of the New Zealand landscape. Howreassuring to know that people like this have lived so fruitfully in this bustling country! “The Child is father of the Man ” What the author is now he was in his younger days, when the country be-

tween ■ Mount Egmont and Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu worked powerfully upon him The later influences of the South Island could only reinforce these initial impressions "In all my years there. 1 painted only a few landscapes over and over and over again, especially one view from my house. I seldom succeeded in doing what I wanted—which was to reach at one stroke the essence of the feeling I had for the landscape; and to pay adequate homage to Cezanne, who mediated between it and myself in much the same way as Shelley had, in that other landscape in Taranaki. But I must have been more of a painter than a poet—l did not imitate Cezanne as I had Shelley." Mr Woollaston can speak out for himself: he has never really imitated anyone.