THEATRE COUNTRYTURI PARK

South CoastGalleryCameron DrawbridgeSouth Coast Gallery302 The Esplanade, Island BayWellington

04 971 8151027 543 0418info@southcoastgallery.co.nz

In June 1998 I became aware of my father Geoff Park’s study of ournotions of the picturesque scene and it’s impact on the shaping of theNew Zealand landscape.

Geoff had come to visit me in London where I was working as afreelance graphic designer. We hired a car and took the opportunity tovisit the ancestral landscapes of our family. My grandfather hails fromEgremont, now a fairly nondescript town on the Western edge ofCumbria, the English Lake District. This town is one of many left inthe wake of iron-mining for the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.We also explored the places so familiar and inspiring to Wordsworthand Ruskin.

While lunching on a grassy knoll in Grasmere, overlooking RydalWater Geoff whipped out a replica Claude Glass on loan from theWordsworth Museum in the poet’s Dove Cottage. At the time Iremember thinking it an eccentric historical oddity. However withGeoff ’s help I have come to understand this wee oval mirror with it’stobacco coloured glass, designed to reflect and capture ideal sceneswhile picnicking, and fill them with luminosity, as the precursor to thecamera. The Claude Glass represents the picturesque ideal that hashad such a remarkable impact since on how we see ‘scenes’.

The Claude Glass and the view of the New Zealand lake Waikaremoanaset within it emerged as the cover design for Geoff ’s recent book“Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua.” The graphic ideaof the Claude Glass on the cover is challenged by it’s modern equivalentthe digital camera on the back. Which I’m sure we still approach witha sub-conscious awareness of the ideal scene when recording a momentin a landscape and saving it to data card.

Exactly 10 years later I found myself staying in a villa in Citerna, onthe border between Umbria and Tuscany in Italy. The same landscapethat had inspired Claude to paint so well that the Claude glass wasdeveloped, and named in admiration.

It was Claude’s work that also inspired JMW Turner. So much that itwas Turner’s dying wish to have his tribute work; The Dido Building,Carthage; hung next to Claude’s The Embarkation of the Queen of Shebain London’s National Gallery, where they are still together today.

More than any other painter, the work and painting techniques ofJMW Turner have been a revelation to me.

This show is really the result of a series of happy coincidences. As apainter learning all the many subtleties that oils demand, being in thisspecial part of Italy was like being a gourmet there for the food. Everytown is filled to dripping with paintings, and just up the road wasFlorence and it’s Uffizi Gallery. I use colours on my palette that arenamed after places that we explored;

• Sienna, from a pigment mined just out of Siena, Tuscany

• Umber, originally from mineral deposits in the Umbrian mountains

• Naples Yellow is exactly the colour of Italian summer sun on plasteror dry straw

• Venetian Red is a red ochre used to paint the first imprimatura stage of a painting.

The Italian images are not intended to be imitations of Claude’s, norTurner’s, but simply scenes that I liked while in the Tuscan countryside.This was a rare chance to paint the beauty of this landscape and theunforgettable light or chiaroscuro of these Italian scenes that has inspiredso many others.

The Italian images are all painted in oil on canvas, and loosely followthe Venetian Technique of painting made famous by Titian, Tintoretto,Canaletto, Caravaggio, Leonardo and others. This process of paintingstarts with an imprimatura, or dark ground, then opaque colours andfinally sfumato or delicate layers of glazes to create atmosphere andcapture subtle light effects.

I would like to thank my father Geoff Park for his depth of knowledge,enthusiasm and the “Theatre Country” idea, which is his*. Thanks tomy lovely Mum for her patience, and to Richard, Frances, Andrew,Niki and Bump Cathie for making the trip to Citerna not just possiblebut a wonder-filled pilgrimage to the source of this ideal world. Andmost of all to Jane, Georgia and Jack for letting me paint when I shouldbe with them.

Turi Park, September 2008.

* Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua., Geoff Park (2006) is published by Victoria University Press and is available from Unity Books in Wellington,or booksellers nationwide.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“A different tradition of landscape painting had arisen inseventeenth-century Italy, lead by Frenchman Claude Lorraine. He was inspired by the warm, even and unchanging light of thecountryside around Rome, and used it in his carefully arranged andidealized landscapes….

….Claude’s undisputed eminence in landscape had a powerfulfascination for Turner, who was mesmerized in particular by theluminosity of the paintings, the way in which the subtle glows ofmorning, afternoon and evening were conveyed through the glazes ofoil. After studying Claude’s work in the collections of his patrons,Turner’s first trip to Italy in 1819 took on the nature of a pilgrimageto the source of this ideal world.”

History & Techniques of the Great Masters. Turner.William Hardy (2003) Chartwell Books.

Excerpts from Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenuaGeoff Park (2006) Victoria University Press.

‘ … One initiator of what has become ‘tourism’, Thomas West’s 1778Guide to the Lakes for ‘Lovers of Landscape Studies’ was deliberatelyarranged so that ‘the changes of scenes is from what is pleasing, to what issurprising, from the delicate and elegant touches of Claude to the noble scenesof Poussin, and from these to the stupendous ideas of Salvator Rosa’.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, or just before it fatefully, physicallyentered the Pacific, the English mind had simply not connected scenery-as-beautiful and painting. Nor did the English yet visit places for theexpress purpose of receiving visual pleasure from them. The picturesqueview of nature, of seeing it as scene after scene, each chosen for itscapability of being formed into a picture, was not part of British cultureuntil its travellers to Europe encountered the landscapes of GaspardPoussin, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine.

For Poussin, landscape was a way to reiterate his belief in classicalprinciples; for Rosa, a chance of evoking the strangeness of nature; andfor Claude, a means of escape into a romantic dream world.

‘ . .. As being one of West’s tourists became fashionable, seeing whatyou stepped up to scenic viewing spots to gaze at became an art. Theproblem for tourists was the same as that for painters: how to organisewhat was, in reality, an arc curving in front of you (what the period’spoets like Wordsworth called the ‘circling landscape’) onto a flat plane.

So that such connoisseurs could render this feat of spatial organisationinstantly, the Claude Glass was invented: a darkly tinted, convex pocketmirror in which, in West’s words, ‘the tourist could see the prospectcondensed and framed, and suffused with the mellow glow of Claude’svisions of Elysium’ — all for the price of requiring you to turn yourback on what you had come to see. Condensed and framed, in themoment of capture, its miniaturised ‘picture’ was a private possession.

‘ ... It was the English passion for picturesque scenery, which crossedthe world with colonisation schemes, that led to the ‘scenery preservation’movement in late 19th century New Zealand. The foundation ofmodern nature conservation, the Scenery Preservation Commission,led by S Percy Smith, used the liminal frontier zone between surveillanceand sight-seeing to delineate ‘Scenic Reserves”, ensuring that Maorileft their old affiliations with nature and place behind, legislativelyemptying the landscape as effectively as any English Enclosure Act’.

From the essay “Theatre Country” in Theatre Country : essays on landscapeand whenua, Geoff Park (2006) Victoria University Press.

“ … As the great British art writer E H Gombrich has shown, naturecould never have become ‘picturesque’ for us unless we had acquiredthe habit of seeing it in pictorial terms. Percy Smith’s New Zealandsearch for beautiful natural scenery was an antipodean offspring of thepursuit of picturesque beauty that sent poets and painters, and England’s earliest domestic tourists, to Wordsworth’s Lake District in search ofmotifs that reminded the art lover of painting in the Poussin andClaude genre.

From the essay “A Moment for Landscape” in Theatre Country : essayson landscape and whenua, Geoff Park (2006) Victoria UniversityPress.

Milan

Venice

Bologna

Rome

FlorenceCitta de Castello

Siena

Arezzo

UMBRIATUSCANY

ITALY

10 km

Siena

Florence

A1

Arezzo

Sansepolcro

Citta de CastelloCiterna

Cortona

PerugiaA1Lake Trasimeno

MAP OF ITALY