Media Type: Painting

About the Artist

New Zealand artist Tony Lane uses iconographic symbols such as necklaces, trees, chairs, veils, and more recently cloud forms carrying a sense of the spiritual and the indefinable, yet anchored to the earth. Or weeping? A chair might stand in for a human presence, while his mountain forms and water suggest the physical world, but Lane prefers not to fix interpretation in place by offering a narrative.

‘I’m very wary of titles, because by being too specific, you can limit a painting. I am trying to start an open-ended conversation.’  (speaking to Art News reviewer Virginia Were).

His visual language is rich, often drawing comparison to European frescoes and renaissance painting, but his delivery is all his own. There’s equally hints of pop art, and European modernism, alongside a sense of classical composition. His landscapes are like a form of still life, hypothetical and imaginary, yet they are anchored, a reference point we all connect with. ‘The imagery comes from everywhere and everything, looking at real things, remembering things. It’s built up the way you build up vocabulary in your speech.’

Tony Lane graduated from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1970, and has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and internationally, living between Auckland and Spain. His work is held in significant public and private collections internationally.

Recent Works

Tony Lane’s recent works emerge from a series ‘Between Heaven and Earth’ which hover between surrealism and a sense of renaissance painting. These paintings link to the New Zealand landscape, the ever present mountains – with perhaps an influence from his early teacher, McCahon – and ideas about our environment, surroundings, in both a physical and metaphorical sense. We cannot connect with this ancient landscape without considering the contemporary issue of climate change, and the need to nurture the forests, the environment.

The mountains connect to the heavens and clouds – the physical to the spiritual – through familiar painterly devices such as strings which could be beads, tears, rain, or some other channel of connection; or haloes of cloud.

They present a kind of ‘still’ life, with space for meditation on our own connections, and consequences. And perhaps the clouds, more present in the new small paintings, are gathering, providing a space to contemplate the future?

About the Artist

Born in New Zealand, Euan Macleod moved from Christchurch to Australia in the early 1980s, and has come to be regarded as one of the foremost painters working across both countries. His paintings often feature a dominant figure striding through or laying atop a powerful expressive evocation of landscape; moody, reflective, often with a sense of history or the past pushing through into the present. Often the figure appears to be walking through cultural history, mythological perhaps.

Euan’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Euan has won art prizes in Australia, including the Archibald in 1999, the Sulman Prize in 2001, the Blake Prize in 2006, the New South Wales Parliament’s inaugural Plein Air painting prize in 2008, the Tattersall’s Landscape Prize in 2000 and 2009, the Gallipoli Art Prize, 2009, and the King’s School Art Prize in 2011.

In 2010 Piper Press, Sydney, published a monograph, Euan Macleod: the Painter in the Painting, written by Gregory O’Brien.

Recent Works

Euan Macleod visited Meretoto/Ship Cove with Gregory O’Brien in October 2022 as part of The Diversion Gallery’s Meretoto project taking artists to respond to that place of sustained early contact between Māori and Captain James Cook. They produced several collaborative works, alongside Macleod’s striking studies in pastel on paper, expressive evocations of place, light, history, and a sense of connection through time.

They continue to work collaboratively, exploring everything from history to environmental issues, their style distinctively different, yet complementary.

About the Artist

‘Much of my work is intuitive, derived from unconscious thought and a willingness and impulse to experiment.’

The work In Casting Light on Shadows explored themes of hiraeth, a prominent thread through Kara Burrowes’ work during her Master of Fine Arts at Canterbury University, completed in March 2023 and awarded Distinction. Seated in nostalgia and an inexplicable longing for ‘home’, Burrowes works intuitively to express her inner dialogue. Drawn to shadow, reflection, muted, foggy and hazy memory, she works to get the feeling translated onto a surface through the use of a variety of media, often unorthodox. Beneath the layers of sublime acrylic paint, scraped back and reworked, are media such as resin or wax, sometimes burned, giving a texture and a sense of something unknown – or unknowable – concealed beneath.

More About the Artist

Kara Burrowes has featured in national and international art awards, notably as a finalist in the Parkin Prize, Molly Morpeth and Wallace Art Awards – flowing on from an early career 1995 award for Landscape Architecture. She lives and works in Christchurch.

She undertook a Masters of Fine Arts (University of Canterbury) in 2022-23, and achieved Distinction on graduating. The return to study took her more intensely back into painting, diverging from her previous mosaic assemblages of found heritage wood, charred and painted. Those processes have flowed through into the new paintings, but are hidden beneath intriguing, subtle and multiple layers of acrylic paint.

Kara Burrowes is establishing her place as a distinctive voice in contemporary abstraction, for her unique view, and often unexpected process, and for works that need first hand viewing to fully appreciate their power and subtlety.

About the Artist

“My art is about keeping our childhood dreams alive as we grow up” – Brad Novak (aka New Blood Pop)

​Brad Novak (Auckland) is a New Zealand-born urban artist exhibiting internationally, whose work sits sharply at the nexus between fine art and street art. Under the moniker ‘New Blood Pop’, his one-of-a-kind, hand-collaged and stencil-spray-painted works involve the layering of popular imagery, into unique works with an edgy commentary on the influence of technology in our lives and outlook.

Novak is shows work internationally through galleries in the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. In October 2015 Novak became the first New Zealand-born artist in the country’s history to show simultaneously alongside both the legendary pop art megastars including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, and the street art global elite such as Mr. Brainwash, Shepard Fairey (OBEY) and BANKSY (Struck Contemporary, Toronto).

Novak uses popular culture, specifically the depiction of celebrities from the hyper-inflated world of American stardom. Icons such as Harrison Ford and Marilyn Monroe inhabit his creations, as do the Stormtroopers and Darth Vader from Star Wars. Their iconography is underpinned by the use of repetitive images of fellow superstars, such as Carrie Fisher and Christopher Reeve, interpreted in different ways in each composition. More recently, he has incorporated some New Zealand icons/superstars like Sir Edmund Hillary, first to conquer Mt Everest.

These artworks, while at first glance visually striking, call for a paradigm shift in the way we experience life itself. Our over-reliance on science and technology has taught humanity to see the world through a dreamlike state that can cause suffering. Many of Novak’s works depict people shedding tears formed from computer circuitry, or looking at the world through a technological ‘lens’.

The artist calls this ‘subconscious escapism’ – the loss of our collective minds. Our ever increasing love affair with technology has definite tradeoffs. However, Novak challenges us to reconnect with reality by practicing mindfulness – getting out of our heads so to speak. Western medicine and psychology is finally catching up to the teachings of ancient Eastern philosophy.

The artist’s dual career as a practising medical doctor also comes to the fore in this series. Medical iconography is drawn upon, with the Caduceus symbol frequently featured. His Hybrid series refers to how everyone has more than one history, one narrative. We all have other strands – just as he is a medical doctor and a successful urban artist.

The artist describes his own experience of the works:

New Blood Pop is concerned with how we experience life itself, the 21st century issues we face such as inequalities in wealth and health, sustainability and globalization. I’m also interested in the idea of escapism especially through science fiction and the superhero franchise. Of the things we choose to believe, what’s real, and what’s not? These works are global, flagrant, iconic and ironic.

I endeavor to create powerful multi-layered works, with an emblazoned foreground overlaying a ‘veiled’ background, to show that many of us are living life through a distorting veil, clouding our perception. Our awareness tainted by biases and judgments – a fantasy that we’ve created for ourselves – the practice of mindfulness promises salvation.

More About the Artist

Whilst living in London in the early 2000s, the urban and street art scenes greatly influenced Novak’s work. Additionally Richard Hamilton’s manifesto on Pop Art provided inspiration. In the letter written to Peter and Alison Smithson in January 1957, Hamilton, a British artist, defined the different characteristics of pop art – describing it as “transient, glamorous, expendable, sexy, and popular”. The frivolity of these terms forms the basis for Novak’s artistic exploration. Novak, however, combined his love for street and pop art to create his urban series – the self-titled ‘New Blood Pop’.

New Blood Pop is…

– Concerned with how we experience life (‘veiled’ or with clarity);
– Concerned with 21st century issues (e.g. inequalities in wealth and health, sustainability and globalization);
– Concerned with escapism (science fiction/fantasy and comics/superheroes-villains);
– Global (non-specific to a particular country);
– Repetitive;
– Scientific or medical;
– Ironic (contains contradictory or contrasting messages).

New Blood Pop (Copyright Brad Novak)

About the Artist

After a decade of exhibiting and teaching in London, Christine Gregory returned to New Zealand in the mid 2000s and exhibits periodically around the country. Best known for her superb ability to handle oil paint and colour, she works primarily in abstract with an essence of landscape still evident within the work. Formerly from Auckland, she now lives in Wellington, teaching and painting.

Recent Works

In a series of small paintings inspired by the landscape, Christine Gregory has used a thick resin glaze which intensifies the colours. She moves between vast and intimate scale with ease, her recent works atmospheric and redolent of swirling skies above the land.

A commitment to modernist abstraction

Roy Good’s abstract paintings are minimalist in form, but carry a sublime painterly subtlety when viewed at close hand. Within panels of each work, the colours are intensely worked, although the surface is often pared back so that from a distance it appears smooth. His use of colours creates planes which appear to advance and retreat against each other, although sometimes it is physical rather than illusion – he layers geometric forms so they literally project from the wall.

A signature feature is the way he takes the form out of the conventional square or rectangle, using a shaped stretcher with notches, angles, layers, and lintel shapes. The shapes catch at our awareness, draw the viewer back, through the element of the unexpected.

Good’s art engages the viewer in the complexities of the act of painting, shifting attention away from the experience of representation, to an awareness of the physicality, tangibility and spatial truths and deceptions of the painted surfaces in front of them. These are great paintings…’ – Warren Feeney, reviewing Roy Good’s Retrospective Exhibition, The Press, January 2011

Born in Timaru in 1945, Good studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch from 1963-65, before moving to Auckland. He was one of a group of abstract artists including Milan Mrkusich, Ian Scott, Geoff Thornley and Gordon Walters who in the 1970s rejected local subjects and pursued an international modernism. His work became very minimalist, using pure geometricism.
Retrospectives of his work were staged in Auckland in 2007 and Christchurch in 2011, attracting strong reviews.

His life and work both as a painter and a designer was the subject of a documentary ‘Parallel Universe’ in the 2026 Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival which toured nationally. Roy Good was for many years head of design for Television New Zealand, and created some of the icons which form part of the nation’s visual identity. When he retired from that role, he was able once again to focus his time totally on his art making.

Recent Works

Roy Good’s paintings in the last decade feature planes of colour that advance and recede in juxtaposition to the adjacent colours. They explore the possiblities of formal shapes and elements, often creating an illusion of relative dimension, and always working towards an absolute balance of elements, often equal elements.

His forms are precisely determined, but within them the colour is applied instinctively, so that planes of colour appear to float or hover under and over each other. Close viewing reveals myriad colour exquisitely applied to further enhance the illusion of space.

Click through each image for details on the work and price.

About the Artist

The rivers and reflections, dramatic skies and dust-blown hills of Marlborough and Canterbury found their way into many of the abstract paintings of leading NZ artist JS (John Shotton) Parker (1944-2017). Highly regarded by collectors nationally and internationally, JS Parker is best known for his large impasto paintings within a grid format, full of texture, rhythm and balance within his imposed framework, exploring juxtapositions of colour.

He worked in thick layers of oil applied with a palette knife, sweeps of paint which he would pare back to reveal hints of what lies beneath. A keen angler and walker, Parker derived much inspiration from the Wairau River and the Wairau Diversion (The Diversion Gallery is named after one of his paintings), particularly the colours of sky and land reflected in the ‘shifting mirror’ of the flowing water. He didn’t consciously set out to paint Marlborough, but his work captured a spiritual feeling about certain places, like the river or the sea at Rarangi (Cloudy Bay). ‘Or you look up to see what the weather is doing against the hills. Water and sky are the most ephemeral kind of elements.’

Based in Marlborough for much of his life, he exhibited nationally and his work is held in national public and private collections. Some of his final major works, full of energy and confidence, formed the anchor to the exhibition Colour & Surface in December 2017-January 2018, along with small studies he intended to translate to a larger scale.

For more details and price of the works here, please click on the image.

Recent Works

Some of the paintings released from the family collection relate strongly to the colours of Marlborough. Lines of Light and Space – Escholztias relates to the Californian poppies lining the summer riverbeds in Marlborough; Three Part Harmony – Landscape captures the subtle colours of one of his favoured areas of Marlborough, the warm earth tones of the riverbank near Rarangi where he frequently walked and fished. The same elements inform the dramatic large oil on paper Plain Song – Landscape.

Inevitably, though, the colours of the landscape, of water, sky, earth (and especially Marlborough), seep into Parker’s Plain Songs, a lifelong evocation of light in late afternoon, evening, on the sweeping plains and the golden dry hills beyond.

The major work Plain Song – Into the Ether (recently released from the family collection) is a sublime example of his works capturing the ineffable in paint. He sought to express a pure spiritual light, a lightness of being, in paint – almost a contradiction – especially finding that quality in lemon light against blue or silver, soft hues in the light of the skies, or of the soul.

A book about JS Parker is available from the gallery: JS Parker: Plain Song by Dr Damian Skinner – an excellent monograph, $35.

More About the Artist

Born in 1944, JS (John Shotton) Parker was described in the Allgemeines Kunsterlexicon international art dictionary as ‘one of the most substantial New Zealand painters of his generation. He stood out as one whose art centres on the pursuit of an approach where vigour has greater value than refinement’. Parker studied art at Ilam School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University and in 1975 was awarded the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Otago University (which is where his long friendship began with fellow painter Ralph Hotere). He ultimately settled in Marlborough and focused on the light and colours of the landscape, where he believed New Zealand’s greatest character lies. His contribution and steadfast vision was recognized in 2003 when he was awarded the Order of New Zealand Merit for 40 years of services to painting. He constantly refined his art towards a horizon of infinite possibility, and experimented with both form and colour – ‘you are not so much creating as discovering.’

The works of this leading New Zealand painter continued to explore the nuances of light and juxtapositions of colour, often inspired by the South Island land, waters and light, sometimes by a feeling of time and place. There is also an enthusiastic following for his unique ‘black and white’ paintings, some using tar alongside white oil paint in a juxtaposition of the staunch and the vulnerable, sometimes jolted with a spike of colour.

His Plain Songs refer not only to the South Island plains but also the formal structure of Gregorian chants within which there are variations on a theme. A music lover of wide taste, he was particularly inspired by blues, jazz and classical music; his work often shows a musical rhythm and balance, or a fine line like a high continuous note. His small Plain Song paintings have the freshness of discovery as Parker explored structures and linkages within a tight framework. He is best known however for his large scale paintings of about 1.2 to 2.5 metres.

About the Artist

Born 1954 in Tolaga Bay, John Walsh is of Aitanga a Hauiti and New Zealand Irish descent. Although largely self-taught, he studied art at Ilam, Canterbury University in 1973-74. After many years primarily exhibiting around his home region of Gisborne and Te Tai Rawhiti, John Walsh had his first major solo exhibition when he was nearly 40 years old, and quickly established a reputation for a mythical realism, founded in the landscape but often featuring mythological figures questing within, moving through or above the land. Walsh rose quickly to prominence, with works on an increasingly large scale. Often his works are in response to contemporary incidents, with a subtle thread of underlying humour, or more serious issues to do with human connection with the land, also influenced by Maori mythology, incorporating ancestral and legendary figures.

He lives and works in Wellington and Te Tai Rawhiti.

Recent Works

The major painting by John Walsh, And Then They Left, arose from his trip to Meretoto/Ship Cove in the Marlborough Sounds as part of the gallery’s First Contact project (as did the Mythical Creatures paintings). He previously visited Fiordland in 2010 with three other artists at the invitation of documentary maker Peta Carey, to film their artistic responses to the places visited by Captain James Cook and painter William Hodges. You can view the documentary The Waterfall on YouTube. John Walsh also created an etching & aquatint for the National Whale Centre artist project.

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.

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.

Gerda Leenards lives and works in the Wellington region. A graduate of Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch in the 1960s, she 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. Gerda Leenards is featured in respected New Zealand art publications, including Lands & Deeds, Gregory O’Brien’s book on significant artists contributing to the landscape tradition in New Zealand art.

Recent Works

Gerda Leenards is known for her intense engagement with landscape, and often references to underlying concerns or issues have been subtle and understated. Her work Inferno is more direct: addressing concern about climate change and the wildfires raging through Canada, Australia and Europe – even, potentially New Zealand.

Her recent paintings of Waitohi (Picton) and the Marlborough Sounds arose from residencies and trips to Marlborough over several years; she consciously researched the history of the original names of these places, such as Tukurehu – the island that floats from the mist – known to many Waitohi-Picton locals as Mabel Island, it was given the new name by a NZ Governor in 1859, after his eldest daughter.

She says many of this series were inspired by the idea of journeys – arrival, departure, safe harbour – reaching back into her memory of the excitement of voyaging to New Zealand in the 1950s.

About the Artist

It is with great sadness we acknowledge the passing of Philip Trusttum in March 2026. He was a huge force in contemporary New Zealand art, vigorous, expressive, intense, and was a mentor and support to many other artists.

A selection of his works are now available through The Diversion Gallery from the Trusttum estate, including a few of his significant Alphabet series, one rare work from his Rugby World Cup suite, and his more recent Signs series, a commentary on the signage banning access for dogs, cyclists and others as Christchurch rebuilt itself after the earthquakes.

Philip Trusttum is recognised as one of the major expressive painters of his generation, known particularly for his large works full of energy, colour, and vigour, inspired by the everyday world as he engaged with it, whether politics, events, family, stories, and objects.

Philip Trusttum graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Canterbury in 1964. In 1967 he travelled on a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council scholarship, and worked in Europe and North America. He was part of ANZART at the Edinburgh Arts Festival, 1984 – the same year he exhibited on New York’s 57th Street at the Jill Kornblee Gallery. He has shown in Sydney, New York, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch, and is represented in all major public and private collections within New Zealand.

Details on the Works

His Signs series offered a subversive commentary on the domestic prohibitions around Christchurch—at the entrance to parks, roads, building sites, pathways. These paintings have the pared-back colour and lighter touch of long experience, while still retaining Trusttum’s trademark energy and edgy humour.

Cyclists appear determined to ride out of the red circle of prohibition, small eager dogs strain as the leash against the strong red diagonal insisting ‘No Go!’ Trusttum’s viewpoint is typically skewed, with the signs viewed from oblique angles, a sense of squashed space, making everyday street language into something strange and disruptive, a push back against authority. Of the first Signs works exhibited in 2016, reviewer Edward Hanfling observed:

‘One registers the sensation of fleeting glimpses, as if from someone actualy riding a bike, of movement and shifting qualities of light, fragments and ruptures, glances down, and things suddenly looming close… Trusttum’s paintings are different from many other forms of contemporary art in that they are so damned delicious.’  – Art New Zealand issue 164

More About the Artist

Trusttum’s Alphabet series were works on a very accessible domestic scale, evolving initially from a single letter as a starting point. By the end of this series, they had evolved to the point the letter was often quite obscure, as other aesthetic interests took over in the composition.

In 2011 he produced a major series focused on rugby players, their movements and forms, presented in the manner of puppet forms. He arranged the limbs in different ways on the wall, photographed these against different backgrounds and created one-off monoprints on aluminium panels. These were the last of his Rugby World Cup series, the depiction of falling players influenced by the Christchurch earthquakes.

Click on the image for more information on each work, and price.

About the Artist

“One of my primary aims is to use the medium of painting to provoke feeling and thought. Just as instrumental and classical music needs no lyrics to create atmosphere and meaning, abstract painting does not need to copy reality to prove its intellectual and aesthetic worth.”

Bridget Bidwill was born in the Wairarapa in 1956. She studied at Ilam School of Arts at Canterbury University, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts in Painting in 1977. After travelling and living in Europe for three years, Bridget Bidwill returned to New Zealand and began painting in 1983. Since then she has exhibited regularly in Wellington and Auckland where she lived until 1995, before moving to Marlborough. Her paintings are in corporate, public and private collections here and abroad.

Bidwill’s work has a shadowy likeness to European and British traditions of modernist painting and yet have their own contemporary awareness. Reference  to Still-Life and more recently landscape remain evident even in her most abstract works. Her paintings create an aura which seems foreign yet familiar – where glimpses of the abstract and the real world converge. She paints mostly in oils on canvas, board and primed paper.

Recent Works

Bridget Bidwill uses subtle tonal contrasts to create a sense of atmosphere and space in works which are abstract but suggestive of elements of reality. She uses freeform shapes such as vessels, bottles, leaves, ovals, which suggest ‘still life’ but are intended to create a meditative space that evokes feeling and thought.
She uses an understated palette, sometimes with fields of colour hinting at the natural world, accented with rich deep reds and blues, working towards a balance; with subtle contrasts so the painting has a sense of movement or poetry.
Bidwill’s recent work has an increasing use of texture either through painting onto layered or collaged canvas or onto textured wood panels, as well as using more thickly applied paint to create variations in surface. The vessels and forms float within the space, but sometimes reveal the layers of work which lie beneath.