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TOSS WOOLLASTON
from IMPORTANT WORKS
Brownacre (1992) oil on board
frame: 1000 x 1260 x 35 mm signed bottom left
Optimistic and celebratory, filled with light, delivered with an elevated lookout point and horizon line, “Toss Woollaston’s great modernist landscapes” with their considerable painterly gesture, fluency of brushstroke and noticeably warm palette changed “the way New Zealanders saw art, their country and themselves.” 1
His palette “with its earth colours applied with more turps and less oil than usual, giving… his characteristic flat finish” 2 was how Woollaston ‘harvested’ and expressed “the rich emotions that have come to me from the landscape.” 3 The “colours I see as assimilating it to the imagination… coalesce invisibly in my sensations… “ 4 Woollaston believed artists should concentrate on the spiritual dimension.
Woollaston – like McCahon – is acknowledged as a defining figure of New Zealand art and a pioneer of modernism. Brownacre (1992) is a major work: it is an outstandingly tangible and sensuous painting, evidencing liberated rhythms as well as being a painted floating world.
Brownacre (official name Mt Campbell, 1330 m high) is located at the northern end of the Mt Arthur Range, Tasman. “It is a prominent element in the mountain backdrop to Motueka and Riwaka. When Toss came to Riwaka to pick apples as an 18year old in 1928 it was colloquially known as Brownacre, from the prominent patch of brownish tussock visible above the bushline. He always used this name, and when he returned to Riwaka to live in the late 1960s it became one of his favourite landscape subjects.” 5
1 Jill Trevelyan (ed), Toss Woollaston: A Life in Letters, Te Papa Press, 2004.
2 John Summers, quoted in Francis Pound, The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity, 1930-1970, Auckland University Press, 2009 p. 120.
3 Toss Woollaston, The Far Away Hills: A Meditation on New Zealand Landscape, November 1960, Auckland Art Gallery Associates, 1962, p. 4.
4 Ibid p. 44.
5 Philip Woollaston, email correspondence with Stephen Higginson, 10 July 2023.
