Young Painter Placed Among Country’s Best

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30939, 21 December 1965, Page 7

Young Painter Placed Among Country’s Best

While he was still a student at the Canterbury School of Fine Art, Philip Trusttum was chosen to represent this country at the Commonwealth Institute’s exhibition of contemporary New Zealand painting, in London. Mr Trusttum’s work was virtually unknown to the selectors, but it was pointed out to them by a lecturer at the School of Fine Art, where his talent was regarded as the strongest in 10 years. They hung three of his paintings with those of New Zealand’s foremost artists, including McCahon, Woollaston, Gopas, Mrkusich and Hanly. At 25, Mr Trusttum, who lives in Christchurch, is considered one of the most promising young painters in the country. Many of his paintings are, in terms of area, on a large scale—and average Trusttum “board” measures eight feet by four. With their brilliant colour and the luxuriant handling of the paint, their visual impact is immediate. FULL CYCLE The really imposing proportions, however, are those in terms of content. In nearly every painting there is a full cycle of life, explored in depth. They are works of immense complexity, intimately detailed in spite of their size, in which the colours are often used in a symbolic, almost expressionistic manner.

Mr Trusttum was born in the King Country, at Raetihi. “I was a bit of a reprobate when I was young—bullying my younger brother—you know,” he said. “A woman came along one day and told my mother to give me a blackboard and chalk. . . . That was probably when it started off, you know, and I’ve been drawing and painting pretty much all the way since.” When he was aged about 10 his family shifted to the South Island, and he went to school at Hawarden, Oxford,

and later Rangiora High School. “That was when I did a lot of horse riding—for four or five yearsCOPYING

Philip Trusttum’s mother sent him to an elderly woman painter near Oxford, who taught him to copy paintings —mainly English water-colour landscapes. “It was a damn’ bore, but probably in the long run beneficial, really.” Until he was 20, he worked in the manchester department of a large city store. He had actually gone there looking for a job as a window dresser, but there were no vacancies, and so he served behind the counter instead. “I did well, really. They wanted me to do a manager’s course or something. ... I had the pleasure of telling them I was leaving that week. I would’ve been a hopeless manager.” The decision to leave and go to art school—he had long been toying with It—became definite after the arrival at the store of a man who had travelled widely overseas. He talked of everything from religious paintings to pigmy blow-darts, and Philip Trusttum listened. “He opened up another world—apart from the eight-to-five one.”

At the School of Fine Art, Philip Trusttum felt at once that his decision had been right—“even if it proved a fatal one.” After his preliminary year, he studied for three years full-time, and would have finished at the end of last year except that he misread the timetable and went off to the West Coast instead of sitting the History and Theory of Painting paper. He sat the paper and passed this year. At the beginning of his third year, 1964, he felt that a style of his own was emerging. “It was as if I’d cleared a bit of space—room to swing a cat, you know." He then painted in an abstract manner, using landscape forms in a ‘‘humanistic way.”

Recently, however, Mr Trusttum has been doing what he calls “cutting back." This involves a striving for harder, more muscular forms, and greater economy in his use of paint. He has, too, switched from acrylic paint to oils: he finds the latter as yet offer a wider range of colours. The size of many of the paintings has also been reduced. More significantly, figurative elements have appeared. This coincided with his marriage to another former student of painting at the School of Fine Art—and the arrival of Martin William Trusttum, now aged eight and a half weeks. With what themes is he at present concerned? Lately, since the birth of his son, with love, womanhood, with birth itself. “I’m mainly concerned with life, just as it’s happening here. I feel caught up with it—l want to portray what I feel—and what’s underlying the feeling. ‘Generally I paint things before they happen, things 1 know roughly are going to happen: you sort of have a feeling.. . .” He admires particularly—and has been influenced bySoutine, Picasso, and earlier Kandinsky and Pollock. In conversation, he refers frequently to Chagall. These painters appeal to him especially because “they’ve gone beyond things—they have’nt cried quits.” Philip Trusttum is a Gemini (June 9), likes Bach and then jazz, works as a postman and dislikes talking about painting. Besides the Commonwealth Institute exhibition, he has exhibited with The Group, Christchurch, 1964 and 1965; Contemporary New Zealand painting, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1964 and 1965; and has held one-man shows at the New Vision Gallery, Auckland, earlier this year, and in Napier at present.