Island images at Gingko

Press, 2 December 1987, Page 24

Island images at Gingko

Last year Tom Burnett and his family spent on the remote Cook Islands island of Aitutaki. He returned to New Zealand this year to finish work on the exhibition of island images now touring the country. The exhibition of prints opens ,on Saturday at the Gingko Gallery. The exhibition will continue until January 28. Tom Burnett was born in London in 1958 to New Zealand parents, Fassett and Huia Burnett, who are both working artists. Tom is their only

child. The family returned to New Zealand in 1964 and young Tom attended Russell Primary and, later, Bay of Islands College and Northland College. He went to school, he says, mainly to use the art room. Tom Burnett began drawing seriously while on a trip to the Tokelau Islands when he was 16. He spent five months living with some anthropologists and did some detailed drawings of things like coconut crabs and reef fish.

He left school at 17 and studied water colour painting with his father. A year later he had his first joint exhibition. Since then, he has had about 20 exhibitions all round New Zealand. He has never had a “real” job except for a brief? stint of builder’s labouring to earn enough money to go bush and build an islandstyle hut when he came back from Tokelau.

He began printing in 1981 and has combined it with painting and drawing since. He achieves the soft effect in screen print-

Ing by using water-based paint on high quality heavy weight French cotton rag paper. His prints have a tropical, . Pacific feel — fruit flowers, colourful fish, ocean-scapes,

boats, north coast bush with palms and ferns. Except for a brief spell In Auckland, he has always lived on the coast in different parts of Northland. His biggest exhibition of 20 prints shown in Auckland’s Portfolio Gallery in 1985, was the result of four years living at Matapouri Bay near Whangarei.