Soft Light

According to Elizabeth Rees, ‘The most mundane aspects of our lives are often majestic, if only we knew it. In New Zealand we live in such overwhelming beauty that we so often take for granted and seldom stop to take in.’ This statement recalls remarks made by others about our assumed indifference to the beauty of our natural environment. For example, the painter Colin McCahon asked us in 1971 ‘Do you believe in the sunrise?’ However, in this age of the smartphone camera, we find a seemingly infinite number of people seeing and photographing natural beauty spots and recording sunrises and sunsets from Waikiki to Palmerston North, where Rees grew up. Landscape has been a well-explored subject in New Zealand art, in particular, and still is, as we can see with painters as diverse as Stanley Palmer and Dick Frizzell. Increasingly the photographic image is used as the reference point by