Media Type: Print

About the Artist

Since 2011, painter and poet Gregory O’Brien has followed the migratory routes of whales and sea birds across vast tracts of the South Pacific Ocean.

Many of his paintings and prints are the result of time spent on a number of islands – Raoul Island (in the Kermadecs), Whakaari/White Island and Tuhua/Mayor Island (in the Bay of Plenty) as well as Rapanui/ Easter Island, Tongatapu and the Chathams.

His works are a poetic exploration of these outlying places, the ocean between them, and the whale species and sea birds which are found there, and of our own cultural and personal linkages with places in the Pacific.

Born in Matamata (1961) and now based in Wellington, Gregory O’Brien is a poet, painter, curator, essayist, and printmaker. He frequently works in collaboration with John Pule, prominent Niue-NZ artist (see separate artwork listings under represented artists); and with painter Euan Macleod.

His book Always Song in the Water, part field notebook, part whale survey, part memoir, offers further insight into his paintings and printmaking; copies are available from good bookstores or Auckland University Press.

About the Artist

“Manuia le aso. Kia orana. Ia ora na. Greetings. I’m Michel Tuffery, a New Zealand-based artist of Samoan, Rarotongan and Ma’ohi Tahitian heritage. My kaupapa within my art practice is the role of working ‘in between’ as a connector by placing a fresh lens on environmental, community, cultural and art historical divides. I had the benefit of being in the first wave of artists with Pacific ancestry to work within the contemporary art world and we all came to prominence in the early 1990’s. I’ve sustained an amazing art career, with incredible platforms to engage myself creatively all over the world. As an active participator in contemporary culture my artwork is curated into major international exhibitions and commissions. Having undertaken numerous research and community residencies throughout the USA, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Asia, India, Australia and much closer to home Aotearoa and proudly the Pacific.” – Michel aka Tuffs 

Michel Tuffery was appointed as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to art in 2008.

Recent Works

Conversations with the past, whanau, and the fragile environment underpin the latest journey through time by Michel Tuffery – a story of being human and connected in other ways, in a technological world.

History flows through into the present day, in this leading Pacific-NZ artist’s use of precious tapa fragments laid onto paper. He allows some of the original lines and drawings on the tapa cloth, as well as the texture, to come through in his overlay of painting, in what he describes as ‘a collaboration with the past’. ‘The lines are like middens, I don’t get rid of those, just work with it, in conversations with those stories.’ The fibre is the ‘hard drive’ – carrying memory, and when it meets the paper, the work is the response. Ancient Lapita pottery shards from Pacific history become a metaphor for the fragility of our environment, pieced together again as a foundation for other motifs of the natural world. Missing fragments reveal a glimpse of the past, through Tuffery’s painterly lens.

Finding taonga goes back to his childhood visits to museums, initiating a fascination with archaeology and anthropology; now, Tuffery has personal connections with major museums internationally, and rare invitations to view and handle precious taonga first hand.

It’s not just about sight, touch and sound. There’s the first smell, a flower over an ear, or coconut oil, as he steps off the plane onto Pacific homeland, greeted by family; or the aroma of taro or kumara signalling home. He uses the original palette of tapa woodblock, overlaid with the moana (ocean) blue, and vivid greens of nature, promising revival.

Human beings are what we touch, he says – like the digital world and the phone; or the plants and ancient stones. Tuffery holds out an ancient black volcanic rock, from Hawaii. This USB stick carries memory, of generations, places, identity and origin, an enduring place in the world.

Michel Tuffery is a prominent New Zealand-based artist of Samoan, Rarotongan and Ma’ohi Tahitian heritage. Within his art practice he plays the role of working “in between” people and places, and focusing a fresh lens on environmental, community, cultural and art historical divides.

His intense engagement with anthropology and archaeology through the Pacific, have brought close relationships with major international museums and institutions, and rare invitations to handle taonga or precious artefacts of history in their collections – connecting through to the stories and memories of past generations and interconnections of cultures. A recent project was a collaboration on the stunning design of the new Dunedin Public Library.

Tuffery is a passionate educator who openly shares his kaupapa and knowledge to empower our youth through residencies and workshops for school-aged children in New Zealand and abroad.

About the Artist

Wayne Seyb’s vigorous oil paintings often capture the raw energy of the New Zealand landscape, an expression of feeling of place rather than a literal interpretation. He typically uses intense colour applied boldly and thickly, in sweeping strokes to express his response the mountains, rivers and coastline of the South Island. Seyb has also worked on woodcuts throughout his career, and these prints have the typical energy, immediacy and expressiveness of his paintings, with an additional directness which derives from the precise demands of the medium.

Recent Works

In 2022, Seyb was the first recipient of the Margaret Stoddart Residency, spending time in the landscape of the Stoddart property at Purau on Banks Peninsula near Christchurch. The first landscapes, exhibited at The Diversion, captured the essence of light on the land and coast, and the intensity of the artist’s response to the landscape. More recently, he travelled up the gondola on the Peninsula over more than a year, capturing an essence of place, feeling, memory.

Of his landscapes, Seyb says you have to have an imaginative hook, to look at the landscape, Seyb says, because otherwise it is just the picturesque. “I like to look at it as something symbolic. It gives a more symbolic edge to the landscape which is what inspires me to paint.” Seyb is never self-conscious in creating paintings – it has always been about his instinctive and personal response to what is happening immediately around him, what he actually sees. Wherever he travels – around the country and overseas – he responds to the landscape, history, art history and literature of the place.

More About the Artist

Born in Temuka in 1961, Wayne Seyb studied formally for a year at Otago before leaving to pursue his individualist direction. He set up a co-operative gallery, Artattack, in 1981, and has since exhibited regularly in dealer and public galleries throughout New Zealand, and in Germany. Wayne Seyb and his family lived for a decade in Karitane near Dunedin, its landscape inspiring much of his painting. They moved to Christchurch in 1999, when the Port Hills, the Southern Alps and West Coast of the South Island became a new field of inspiration, although Otago and Southland continue to feature strongly in his paintings.

Seyb has also produced expressive woodcuts most of his career, especially in capturing human activity around him. Often he uses a different colour palette for each print of the small edition, each with a unique personality.

He travels to the USA regularly to see family, and this inspires vigorous responses to events, people, activity and culture. Please enquire if you would like to view works from these series.

About the Artist

Fatu Feu’u – Background

In speaking about his art practice, Feu’u asserts an intention to mediate an understanding of Samoan culture and history. What is equally apparent is that Samoan culture is the filter through which Feu’u interprets all that is around him. From national issues of race relations in New Zealand, and international conservation concerns, to very personal themes of a child’s struggles and personal estrangements, all are worked through a very Samoan world view.

– Art New Zealand, 2004

Fatu Feu’u explores motifs of Pacific and particularly his Samoan culture but with a strong modernist interpretation, in paintings, limited editions and dramatic sculptures. His love of Picasso and the early 20th century modernists is also evident, but he has established a distinctive style which sees him recognised as one of the leading New Zealand Pacific artists.

Fatu Feu’u was born in Samoa in 1946 and moved to New Zealand at the age of 20, working in textile design before becoming a full-time artist in his early 40s – encouraged by his friends and mentors Pat Hanly, Tony Fomison and Philip Clairmont, all major artists of the 20th Century. He now works between New Zealand and Samoa, and is known for work that blends traditional imagery with Western influences.

He has won major art awards including the Wallace (1995) and the Pacific Islands Artists Award (1996). His work is held in major collections including New Caledonia, Australia, New York and Germany, and he has undertaken significant commissions for works throughout the Pacific. He was awarded the Order of New Zealand Merit in 2001 for services to the arts and was founding patron of the Tautai Pacific Arts Trust.

His work draws inspiration from ancient designs and patterns – from tapa cloth, lapita pottery, and tattoo – which were informed by cultural values of balance, symmetry, and reciprocity. However, he adds his own personal meanings and metaphors.

Over the past decade, Fatu Feu’u has developed a series of works based on the Samoan tradition of ‘ifoga’ or reconciliation/rebuilding after a terrible event or action. The central letter ‘I’ as a motif captures this, with different colours coming together, meeting half way.

Recent Works

A new series of significant paintings meld traditional Feu’u motifs such as atua, tagaloa, long-nosed god, and symbols of voyaging, with his recent expressive abstract technique, creating an overlay relating to issues of conservation and sustainability and impact of climate change on the Pacific.

The Tapui works, unique handpainted woodcuts on heavy paper, carry a powerful central motif of tapu areas ‘protected’ by squares with a cross through them, with suggestions of sails and traditional motifs in the background. The sails are sometimes faintly defined, implying spiritual guardians of the ocean resources. Tapui effectively means a protection over a place or object of major significance.

We also have in stock selected earlier limited edition prints by Fatu Feu’u, some the last of edition. Maui Tikitiki and Hinemoa Springs are from a series of handworked woodcuts focused on water and its legends. The colours red and yellow are signifiers of the place of the high chief and the orator respectively, and appear frequently in his paintings and sculptures.

Sculpture and medallions

Feu’u is known for his powerful sculptures from large scale to domestic works, and the intimacy of bronze medallions like touchstones, carrying his familiar motifs.

Click on each artwork image for medium, background and price.

About the Artist

Born in 1949, Nigel Brown is widely acknowledged as one of our most important figurative artists and most significant narrative painter. He lived in the North Island for many years before returning to the southernmost coast of the South Island with partner Sue McLaughlin in 2001, then to Dunedin in 2016. He graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland in 1971, has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his works are held in important public and private collections including several in the National Collection at Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand. Nigel Brown has received three Queen Elizabeth II Art Council grants, and been awarded the Order of New Zealand Merit. While viewers often respond to his content or intent, his distinctive style and handling of paint are part of the cut-through and reality of his message. Many works bring into question the way we live – issues of sustainability, and of finding intuitive rather than strictly scientific solutions – with his sharply ironic humour underpinning the delivery of his ideas. Among Brown’s best-known works are paintings challenging the notion of the ‘New Zealand man’, the ‘real Kiwi’, staunch in the black singlet, man of the land, arms folded, uncompromising. A period in Russia on an arts residency reinforced his interest in ‘icons’ of our identity – such as the New Zealand man, Captain Cook – but also of icons of our environment – the birds, the ponga as tree of life, the landforms – and legendary figures like the poet James K Baxter or Brown’s own motif, the man-woman couple. His recent works focus very strongly on living sustainably in the landscape, especially the intuitive way birds live, as opposed to the scientific classification of the world exemplified through Cook. He uses the kererū in an emblematic way much as artists in ancient cultures did, viewing the world through the eyes of the creature; he tells stories of a ‘Climate of Change’ – socially and environmentally. ‘I have wanted to get closer to kererū, not in the sense of zoom lenses and fine details, but in a more ancient, psychic and emblematic sense’.

Recent Works

The ungainly but beautiful kererū lumber into the skies carrying hope, urging an intuitive approach. Sustainability and the need for the workers of the land (often represented by his iconic ‘black singlet’ man) to become nurturer are central to recent paintings, often with a gilt sky emphasising ‘icon’ status of certain motifs and figures, including the kererū, the ponga or tree of life, the black singlet man. Brown is also keen to escape the constraints of the ‘rectangle’ format: his painted plywood cutouts counter ‘the cool smooth slickness of our techno society with a rough homemade authenticity’.  A black singlet figure remains as a kind of physical labourer needing to evolve into a nurturer. He hopefully needs to be seen as an ongoing painting device or a vehicle for the subconscious rather than as a number eight wire anachronism stuck in the past. Only viewed in this way can he measure up to the challenges facing the planet… 

More About the Artist

Nigel Brown was a founding member of VAANA – Visual Artists against Nuclear Arms – and with the strong connection his art made with New Zealanders, he used it to challenge views on social and environmental issues. He continues to use his paintings as a vehicle to challenge ideas about the environment, and about the way we connect with each other.  Nigel Brown challenges the viewer to think harder about notions of identity, history, and also about conservation and social issues. His sharp-edged, often ironic humour engages the viewer before he delivers the challenge, but he is well aware there is more than one side to every argument, and leaves room for interpretation and cogitation. 

His Climate of Change series often uses his motif of the ‘black singlet man’ or Joe Taihape, but now with head bent in a pose of passive care, nurturing the land and the birds within it, a symbol of how humankind, as the users (sometimes abusers) of the land, must now become its nurturers.

Meretoto/Cook series:  Nigel Brown continues to challenge the myths and truths of Captain James Cook’s engagement with New Zealand. Latterly Brown has been involved in a project of artistic encounters with Ship Cove/Meretoto in Tōtaranui/Queen Charlotte Sound, Cook’s preferred anchorage in Aotearoa. His sense of the ironic is often directed at the ‘iconic’: the kererū, the whare, the kiwi, the ponga tree, the dramatic landscape.