Gerda Leenards

For background on the artist and works, see below.

Current Works

About the Artist

Gerda Leenards grasps fleeting moments, the transience of light and weather in paintings of infinite subtlety. Her works may appear to be landscape, yet are not – Leenards actually paints the light, the weather and echoes of memory, rather than the landforms, and is intrigued by ideas about the transformation of the land and water by the swiftly changing light. (See below for notes on her latest works).

Born in the Netherlands, Leenards emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 10, and her Dutch heritage and awareness of the European masters does influence her work. She is often identified as one of New Zealand’s leading landscape artists, but doesn’t see these paintings as landscapes as such. ‘Often landscape is handled in a very stationary way: here are two cabbage trees and a roadway. It’s very descriptive of the road and the trees.’ She is conscious of the way painters like Turner and Constable explored the effects of weather. But she points out those painters were working at an exciting time when scientists were just beginning to understand weather and cloud formation. ‘There was a feeling then that the earth was permanent. Now everything is changing very fast.’ Issues such as global warming and the fragility of the earth interest her, and while she doesn’t paint it literally, this awareness has an influence on her painting of the transience of nature.

Recent Works

Seaward journeys, the anticipation of adventure and the freedom of oceans have always fascinated Gerda Leenards, since a three month voyage emigrating with her family in the 1950s. These underpin her distinctive new paintings of Waitohi/Picton and the Marlborough Sounds.  ‘There’s excitement and magic, and a meditation, in no longer being landbound – a feeling you could journey anywhere.’ She captures a sense of shelter in the Waitohi/Picton harbour in her Night Berth and dusk paintings, while moody depictions of Tukurehu, ‘the island that floats from the mist’ (also known as Mabel Island), is glimpsed as a signal of ocean journeys beginning and ending, defining the edge of the harbour.

There’s a counterpoint in the sublimely meditative Kenepuru works, veiled in white mist, sparked by a residency at The Portage Resort many years ago, and painted in homage to a poem Kenepuru, for you, written for her by the late Don Binney in 2006.

Her Kapiti Island and other works are more direct: addressing concern about climate change, regenerating forests as well as the wildfires raging internationally. The Kanuka series was inspired by stands of trees holding to the edge of the riverbank near Foxton, underpinned by knowledge such as the response of trees to environmental degradation: limited sequestration of carbon dioxide, for instance. Her paintings are seductive, but the message may have an edge.

More About the Artist

A graduate of Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch in the 1960s, Leenards has exhibited in the major public galleries in New Zealand and was three times a Visa Gold Award finalist. She has works in most public collections in New Zealand including Te Papa, the National Museum. Her work The Nature of Culture toured in the national show Inheriting the Netherlands. She attracted critical acclaim for the way she captured the fragile and mist-laden world of Fiordland. She has simultaneously explored other territory, with a common thread surreal or moody weather, atmospheric vapour, and ambiguities created by the changes of light, including the Chinese landscape after journeys through that country following ‘the Blue Ribbon’. Gerda Leenards is featured in several respected New Zealand art publications, including Lands & Deeds, Gregory O’Brien’s book on the landscape tradition in New Zealand art.