Country church

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Bill Sutton was a prominent figure in mid-twentieth-century art in New Zealand. His representation of the Canterbury landscape gained him national recognition as the country’s finest regionalist painter. This work belongs to his ‘Country church’ series, which began in 1950 with the well-known Nor’wester in the cemetery (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), a large-scale painting of a Canterbury churchyard, and concluded in 1962 with Country church, Governor’s Bay (private collection).

When Sutton returned to New Zealand in 1949 after two years in England he moved away from outdoor painting and began to construct his compositions in the studio, working from sketches and notes that he made in the local landscape. His fascination with the early churches that he found dotted around the countryside and in settlements near Christchurch became the starting point for this series. Both a photograph and an undated preparatory pencil drawing, inscribed ‘7th Day Adventist Church, Oxford’ (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū), identify the building that served as the model in this painting and point to variations that Sutton made in the detail. In the painting, which like Nor’wester in the cemetery is a compilation of landscape as well as architectural elements, a small wooden church is artfully placed between two flanking cabbage trees on the scorched plain and against a backdrop of ochre hills and blue sky. Clear light throws each carefully chosen motif into sharp focus, and emphasises the shabby and dirtied weatherboards. A blackbird perched on the gable roof contributes to the ordinariness and overall ambiguity of the scene.

Sutton had trained in the 1930s at the Canterbury University College School of Art, where he attended the landscape painting classes of Cecil Kelly and learned to work out of doors in a conventional and cautious tonal impressionism. The period in England expanded his options, introducing him to paintings by contemporary British artists while also sharpening his appreciation of modern directions in New Zealand landscape art. He later recalled that it was the experience of being away that brought into view the distinctiveness of this country’s physical environment — and that change of outlook found immediate expression upon his return.

Julie King