Grey Matter

Alan Pearson first settled in New Zealand in 1956. He was an older student at the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch; then a graduate at London’s Royal Academy of Art. His roots were in northern England, where he had been born into a working-class family in Liverpool in 1929. As a child he had drawn, prodigiously, but had to wait for formal education as an adult, in Wellington, after suffering an injury while working on the inter-island ferries. The injury gave him time and compensation money to begin focused study.

A dynamic student, he was painting and exhibiting in his adoptive country from the mid-1960s. He would be working at his art through some of the most fraught moments of its history. Constant transitions in critical theory have seen the idea of ‘easel painting’ shaken to its foundations, its very existence as a legitimate medium being called into question. The waves of analysis rolling over the arts: modernist, late-modern, post-modern and now meta-modern have involved a sustained discourse, often hostile to painting.

Pearson was alert to new ideas, but very capable of ignoring any that did not fit with his own vision of the arts. This was to build on the strengths of the past, using his singular perception of the present to do so. Painting had been intrinsic