Preservation Urged Of Wooden Buildings

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32396, 8 September 1970, Page 2

Preservation Urged Of Wooden Buildings

New Zealand’s wooden buildings should be preserved for their beauty and historical record, according to a Welsh artist, Mrs Elizabeth Parrott.

I When she was in Nelson Mrs Parrott was fascinated by the old colonial homes, and she is hoping to be able to sketch the Midland Club building in Oxford Terrace before she leaves Christchurch. “Some of the old wooden houses are really lovely, and

’they should be preserved,” she said yesterday. “Very soon all these old records of the past will be gone.”

Mrs Parrott’s sketch book accompanies her wherever she goes. While her husband. Professor lan Parrott—composer and professor of music at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth—is examining for the Trinity College of Music in New ' Zealand, Mrs Parrott is recording their travels in ink and wash. Many of her sketches will become oil paintings when she returns home. Portraits Although portrait painting is her first love, Mrs Parrott sketches and paints landscapes “because the world’s so interesting." Now she is assembling material from her world trip to be included in a planned illustrated diary, entitled “The Talkative Brush.” Mrs PaifOtt was born in Leningrad, and returned from England to live there for 12 years. It was then she developed her love of architecture. “There are so many beautiful buildings and museums in Leningrad,” she said. But it is faces which attract her most as an artist Next year she hopes to finish a refresher course in portraiture at the Studio Simi in Florence. She was nominated for the course by a well known British artist who

admired one of her exhibited works. “Artists from all over the world study with Senora Simi,” Mrs Parrott said. "One of the studio’s great advantages is that although Senora Simi is getting elderly now some of the artists who have studied under her will go on teaching, so that the cen-turies-old Florentine technique will be propagated.” “Healthy Sign” Although she paints in the classic style, aiming to create “a good painting and a great likeness, a record for the future,” Mrs Parrott considers present experimentation in art a healthy sign. “The danger is that the classic form will be lost,” she said. “All the art schools in Britain have swung to the opposite extreme. What will happen when artists want to return to the classical form, will they have to continue with abstracts?”

While the couple were in Nelson several of Mrs Parrott's oil paintings were exhibited. She brought two portraits, and a winter scene of an old stone tweed mill near her home, to New Zealand. Both will be put forward for selection at the exhibition of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington this month. 1 One of her paintings, a [landscape of Cardigan Bay

where Professor and Mrs Parrott live, was accepted by Prince Charles as a memento of his time in Aberystwyth. Both she and her husband were most impressed by the Prince of Wales’s “intelligence, charm and determination to make a good job of his position.”

Learning Welsh

“And he has done so well with the Welsh language. I’ve been studying it for 20 years and I'm still learning.” Professor Parrott has taken O-level examinations in Welsh because he believes he should be knowledgeable in the language in which his students think. Maori art is a facet of New Zealand life Mrs Parrott plans to study in more depth during the remaining few months of her nine-month stay here.

Maori Sketches

Already she has several pages in her sketch book filled with Maori carving, weaving, and rafter designs culled from examples in the Wellington Dominion Museum. For the family Christmas card this year Mrs Parrott has sketched a Maori meeting house with a cut-out door showing a map of New Zealand. The card opens to show a map of the world depicting the Parrott’s present tour.

“I plan to go to Rotorua and get .a lot of head studies that I can develop when I get home,” she said. Professor and Mrs Parrott have two sons. The elder is a cellist with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and his brother is in the agricultural department of Aberystwyth College.