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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 5 (November 2, 1931)

To Our Artists

To Our Artists.

Lord Bledisloe has been counselling New Zealand landscape painters to pay more devotion to the fine dramatic features of our scenery–the forests, fiords, lakes and mountains. His suggestions are fitting and needful. Too many of our artists fritter away their energies, paint and canvas on subjects not worth a second glance. They are dazzled, a few of them, by the freakish foolishness of cubism, which permits an artist to dispense with accuracy of drawing and colouring and to perpetrate in all solemnity the infantile efforts we proudly produced when our parents gave us our first sixpenny box of paints. We have some artists who refuse to take refuge in this sort of lazy-man's picture-making, and who try to reproduce something of the real colour and form of our landscape glories. But they are all too few.

page 43

Another notable deficiency in our art exhibitions concerns our national history. Not one of our artists of to-day ventures to depict the stirring and inspiring episodes in New Zealand's story. What a wonderful field is there for really great pictures! Subjects come crowding to the mind. And how New Zealanders, and visitors from beyond our shores, would welcome the sight of a painting or a drawing that indicated a spirit of artistic research and an appreciation of the nobility of theme that so many chapters of our history hold. The material is there in endless variety; the brains and the brush are needed to interpret it.