About/Contact

Email-               alistairsart@gmail.com

Facebook-     Alistair McDonald – Artist  https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063637925088

Instagram-    alistair.mcdonald.artist  https://www.instagram.com/alistair.mcdonald.artist/ 

I live at Bottle Creek on the Pauatahanui arm of Porirua Harbour, 30km north of our capital city Wellington, New Zealand.

My work includes painting (oils and acrylics); illustration and cartooning; sculpture (wood, Oamaru/lime stone, mixed media); and stained glass.

Hope you enjoy.

New Zealand Landscapes – Oils

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity (Giacometti)

Our landscape is a gift – most of the colours and shapes, a series of gorges and bowls shaped by ice and water, never far from the sea, with few flat horizons and the land (visually) bossing the sky.

It’s a dynamic landscape too – Ruamoko, the unborn restless earthquake/volcano god, making his earth mother Papatuanuku “subject to geological change without notice” (Durrant) and his angry teenage brother Tawhiri wearing her down with wind and storm.

Which is an invitation to move the shapes and colours around and change what’s there, as Nature does.

Japan-influenced – Acrylics

I got hooked on the ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) style through an exhibition of Ando Hiroshige’s uchiwa-e fans at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London – bold flat expressive colours, clean line drawings and stories of another era and culture.

These are nikuhitsu-ga, paintings in an ukiyo-e style. I have tried to imagine how Hiroshige (1797-1858) and his contemporary Hokusai may have shown views of modern Wellington, Auckland, Queenstown, Wanaka, Mt Maunganui, Taranaki, Sydney and Melbourne if they were alive today.

  

3 influences:

Right v Left
During a period of teaching, I developed a problem-solving model involving choices of left or right brain thinking as steps of a process. However most of my work (lawyering) was analysis and communication, not a lot of core creativity.

Art is problem-solving of course: first getting the technical/archival side right and planning (a bit); then letting the creative side loose, thousands of decisions in every piece and a licence to make mistakes.

I like being more in that cross-over now, and how pieces develop a life of their own as a result – best of all, I like being my own client.

History and Myth
The stories are alive, whatever the time or culture.

Colour Choices
1 in 10 males (1 in 256 females) are red-green colour vision “impaired” – in my case moderately, so that I don’t easily identify some non-core reds and greens, and also reds within mixes (oranges/browns and violets/purples).

Colour was off limits for me from age 5 (the common purple sky-unaware teacher story) until turning 40. Now it is:
– a point of difference, 5% of us live in a parallel (equally valid) colour world;
– a challenge, as to how to use that in my art.
Plus there is no temptation to do other people’s “realism”, which is liberating.

(I mention this in case it avoids anyone abandoning colour for 35 years – if your child sees something as, say, green, then it is green (if they ask, tell them what you see and let them decide) – Colblindor http://www.colorblindness.com  : /https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness).

Articles/Links

https://www.stuff.co.nz/…/te-hkoi-toi–more-than-one…

https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/in-the-style-of-hiroshige/?fbclid=IwAR2CXvgj1v-_N1cOQnfM3fb8dLzh3nttBKYiVWwDLMVOImUrGnjEeaag0Rg

https://www.regionalnews.kiwi/articles/aotearoa-through-a-japanese-lens

https://exhibitionsgallery.co.nz/exhib…/alistair-mcdonald/https://exhibitionsgallery.co.nz/exhib…/alistair-mcdonald/

https://exhibitionsgallery.co.nz/…/artists-in-lockdown…/

https://www.flagstaff.nz/collections/alistair-mcdonald