LAURENCE ABERHART, photographer
To me, there are two categories to this question: work that I admire, and work that I covet.
The work I most admire is Robin White’s painting Summer Grass. When I saw it for the first time in very humble surroundings, I thought, “How brave. How beautiful.”
The subject of the painting, which is never stated except in the most oblique way, through imagery, alludes to the Japanese POW riot and deaths in the Featherston camp they were imprisoned in, in which 48 prisoners and a guard were killed in February 1943. I was moved by the fact that the artist was choosing a most unpalatable subject, one that had almost been ignored in our collective social history, and delivered her message and memorial in the most beautiful painterly and seemingly understated manner. Epic in size and subject.
The artwork I most covet, though, is a painting by Bill Hammond, Every time I
