Kaikoura Monkey Face Reserve part 2.

In their deceptive simplicity, rock drawings are powerful taoka [cultural treasures], which represent one of the long-range continuities of Maori art.

Archaeologist Atholl Anderson, 1988

In the mid 1940s, the artist Theo Schoon became deeply interested in the South Island Maori drawings in the limestone caves of Canterbury and North Otago.

Ethnologist Roger Duff had dismissed the drawings as ‘the scribbling of storm-bound Maori travellers’. Schoon was the first non-Māori artist to see their value as art. In 1946, he managed to secure funding to record them.

These four paintings all depict drawings from the Kaikōura region. They are just a fraction of Schoon’s survey. Although they document rock art, they are also modernist paintings in their own right.