Capturing the high country

Press, 9 November 1988, Page 26

Capturing the high country

KAY FORRESTER

meets Carol Newman

Like the goldminers of last century, painter Carol Newman has found gold in the hills of Central Otago. Her gold is the inspiration she draws from the high country for her paintings. The painter from Twizel has captured much of what is unique about the tussockland and mountains but says there are countless paintings left in the country and people of Central Otago.

She moved to Twizel three years ago with her family and has not stopped painting since. The self-taught painter from Christchurch really began to paint when she and her husband, Ray, were living in Singapore.“He knew I liked to paint and bought me some paints and it started from there,” she says, pointing to a small portrait of a boxer on the wall of her Twizel home. “That was my first painting.” Since then there have been many more as she developed her skills with oils. There have been portraits — of people and horses — but now the Mackenzie Country provides the subject material. “There’s just so much to paint, and now that the children are older, more time. I like to paint for two to three hours a day.” Two or three hours a day means she will finish a detailed study of musterers of high country stock in about a month. "The paintings take 50 to 70 hours of work.” She works from photo-

graphs taken on tramps with the local tramping club or by her husband on outings with the musterers of Glen Lyon Station. “I start with the photograph and begin painting at the top of the picture and just work down filling it in.” “Filling it in” means delicate work with fine brushes to capture the shadows and lights of the hillsides, and the animals and people that live on them. Sometimes she uses parts of more than one photograph to create the pictures she wants. “I only paint one paint-

ing from a photograph. If I’m painting a commission I usually give people the photograph too so they know their painting is original and the only one.” She does quite a bit of commission work. Before the present Mackenzie Country subjects she painted two racehorses for the Addington Raceway hall of fame, and the Kingston Flier for Ferrymead. Until a year ago she sold her work through the Westside International Gallery in Christchurch but she decided she wanted to move away

from the tourist market. “I wanted to get New Zealanders’ reactions to my work. Most of my paintings were going to the States. I want some of them, and what I feel about what I’m painting, to stay in New Zealand,” she says. New Zealanders will get the chance to see the last year’s work at a display of her paintings in Still’s Corner Gallery in Timaru in mid-November. She has been asked to prepare work for exhibition or sale in Queenstown but is reluctant — “Again that’s directed at the tourists.”

The most difficult aspect of her Timaru exhibition has been collecting enough paintings — “I’ve sold 94 per cent of my work. I have no trouble selling the paintings.” They sell for $350 to $lOOO plus, depending on the detail and time in the work. The attraction for Carol Newman of the country around the town where she lives is its vastness and colour and especially its people and animals. “I like painting the musterers at Glen Lyon ...they have been wonderful letting us take photographs. And I like painting sheep but I went off sheep because the tourists like sheep and I painted a lot of them.” Because she does not paint for her living — and now not principally for the tourist market — she can paint pretty much what she wants. She says she works best without the pressure of having to create what others want. "Even commission works — if the person doesn’t like the finished painting they don’t have to buy it. I can still sell it.” Her aim is to capture the essence of the high country. “There’s so much still to paint.” The only part of the landscape that inspires her about which she has mixed feelings is Mount Cook. "I painted so many Mount Cooks for the tourists I couldn’t care if I never saw it again.”