Exhibitions

Auckland

Freeman White Call of the Ocean

Sanderson Contemporary 22 October–10 November RICHARD WOLFE When the European easel painting tradition was transplanted to nineteenth-century New Zealand, it was hardly surprising that the surrounding ocean would prove a popular subject for artists. As well as claiming some 15,000 km of coastline, no part of this country is more than 120 km from the sea.

By the late 1870s, Scottish-born Christchurch artist John Gibb had established himself as this country’s premier marine painter with his estuarine, coastal and harbour views. More recently, Napier-based Freeman White has brought the tradition into the twenty-first century. He came to national prominence in 2006 by winning the Adam Portraiture Award, and three years later began painting the New Zealand landscape. Since then, rolling hills have given way to breaking waves, the subjects of these eleven seascapes painted in 2019.

With one exception, the location of all these paintings is the beach adjacent to Napier’s Marine Parade, and within earshot of the artist’s home. White confronts the ocean head-on, catching it in all its restlessness and relentlessness, and the endless succession of waves simultaneously forming and breaking. Each canvas deals with a single moment in time, a unique and random arrangement of elements which makes the viewer aware of this subject’s infinite possibilities.

, one of the two largest works, is a study of wave peaks and troughs interspersed with spattered flecks of spray and spume, while a slather of thick white foam advances up the beach. There is a smaller and similar version of this painting, as there is of, which is a study of the same wave at a slightly different stage in its brief lifecycle.