Painted in 1986, Sir Tosswill Woollaston’s
distant hill, winding ribbon of water
painting Devil’s Thumb, Nelson is a work
and two bays at the foreground that are
Devil’s Thumb, Nelson
that resounds with romantic flourishes
trimmed with golden sand can be clearly
oil on board
of dense oil paint, which eloquently
made out.
54
TOSS WOOLLASTON
signed Woollaston and dated 86 in brushpoint lower left; signed M.T. Woollaston, dated 1986 and inscribed The Devil’s Thumb in black ink on stretcher verso 1215mm x 1825mm $100,000 - $150,000
point to the artist’s refined sensitivity to
The dynamic sweeps and thick
the rhythmic gradations of landscape.
dollops of paint in Devil’s Thumb, Nelson
The viewer is placed on a high and
are testament to Woollaston’s belief in
omniscient vantage point and the
the importance of the artist’s bodily
terrain swoops out below in a graceful
relationship to his paintings. In this,
arch, hugging the basin of water and
the energetic arm movements, the
continuing out beyond the confines of
hand flourishes and the rhythmical
the painting’s physical parameters.
fluid motion of the artist’s body before
Gestural passages of burnt umber,
the painting are seen to be marked
rich ochre, dove grey and sapphire
out in the two-dimensional scene that
blue flit across the surface of Devil’s
results. The significance that Woollaston
Thumb, Nelson, offering the viewer a
placed on the relationship between the
chromatic patchwork that speaks of
physical entities of artist and canvas
summery days and coastal glissades.
combined with his inherent interest
The artist’s treatment of the landscape
in always maintaining and expressing
in Devil’s Thumb, Nelson is consistent
an authenticity of feeling points to
with Woollaston’s approach to landscape
the omnipresent tension in his work
painting throughout his long career,
between object and subject. In a letter
which was generally marked by a
written in 1980, Woollaston asserted
reductionist aesthetic that was filtered
that “art is hard on the subject and the
through expressionistic concerns. In
subject on art”, which can be seen to
this, Woollaston was influenced by the
underline his pre-eminent belief in
post-impressionist works of the so-called
the primacy of individual perception,
‘father of modern art’, Paul Cézanne, and
whereby painting consistently demands
the work of the romantic poets, William
a lot from its subject.1 Devil’s Thumb,
Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and John
Nelson clearly illustrates the two central
Keats. This idiosyncratic combination of
threads of Woollaston’s landscape art:
inspiration that is drawn from sensually
his ability to reduce the countryside
emotive poetry and pared-back visual
into a series of almost abstract patterns
forms endows Woollaston’s landscapes
and forms that are presented through
with a delicate subjectivity. This in turn
a bustle of painterly strokes; and his
invites the individual to draw from his
searing dedication to preserving an
paintings their own emotive responses
emotional validity through which the
to the evocative nature of the roughly
landscape comes to be painted. It is this
hewn shapes and pigment variegations.
intrinsic duality in Woollaston’s work
Despite Woollaston’s commitment to
that has accorded him a unique place
clarify and condense the scene before
in the history of New Zealand art as one
him, the finer details of the landscape
of the country’s most-crucial modernist
of Devil’s Thumb, Nelson are still
landscape painters.
discernable. A low, curving coastline,
JEMMA FIELD 1 Tosswill Woollaston as quoted in Tony Green, Toss Woollaston: Origins and Influence (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), p.37.