About YVONNE and her art

HOW DID IT START, WHAT AM I DOING AND WHY DOES IT MATTER ?

“Nearly 50 years ago I went to a night class in New Plymouth and the teacher put some objects on a table and said “Draw that”.

I still have that picture and it tells a lot about my natural instinct to put everything in a painting, tell the whole story, be literal.    I remember the pencil seemed blunt and the paper too small.

After numerous teachers, workshops, years of experimentation with everything from a brush on a 3 feet long pole, to making our own rabbit skin size, cheap paper and canvas, expensive paint, the advice to “go bigger”, lockdown, digital enhancement, looking at thousands of other artists, You Tube, art magazines, you name it…. My understanding way back then was that someone has to teach you to be an artist and you will find the “answer” in the research.      It helps a bit, but I think I should have just trusted myself and seen what happened.      In lockdown I trusted the process and did 40 paintings because I had the confidence, the time and few distractions.

I still find art making intriguing and now I am challenging myself to make art that engages me with basic materials (paint and paper) . It’s fascinating to see how for instance repetitive marks done with the human hand can be so similar and yet so different to each other. A little bit of Zen going on there. Little steps like in most of life.oing this reminds me that .

I like it when people ask “are they prints” ??   say viewers.   Slowing down in this fast paced world, looking more closely, they see the human hand.      I use colour combinations that resonate with me and often it’s the colour that initially attracts people.  During the process my mind is completely on the task which I find relaxing.

I have decided that when people describe me as an artist, I say yes I am”.

Yvonne works from her studio in the sunny Bay of Plenty.    In her 20’s she started a life-long interest in art, making it, looking at it all over the world, selling and leasing many artists’ work throughout New Zealand as the former Managing Director of Art Bureau NZ, and encouraging other artists through her skill at organising workshops for art tutors, at Te Puna Quarry Park, Tauranga.

She appreciates that the little steps in life add up to a much more powerful whole, if we can only have persistence, confidence and patience.     The title of her work, which was chosen as a Finalist in the Tauranga Art Gallery Miles Awards 2022, was “Big Things Have Small Beginnings”.