Mangaweka

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

Although dated 1973, Mangaweka had its origins in 1971, when Robin White, a recent Elam School of Fine Arts graduate, was living in a tiny cottage at Bottle Creek on Pāuatahanui Inlet, near Porirua. That year she and her fellow Bottle Creek resident, the poet Sam Hunt, made a road trip to visit friends who lived near the small rural settlement of Mangaweka, near Taihape.

When they stopped in the main street, White immediately noticed the truck parked in front of an old wooden building. ‘The truck belonged there,’ she recalled. She admired the ‘Mangaweka’ on the door and how it ‘blended with the lines of the building and the curves of the hills beyond’. She took a series of photographs — close-up views and shots incorporating the background: ‘I saw the painting before I ever painted it.’1

Back at Bottle Creek, White was busy with other projects. Late in 1971 she left for Dunedin, bought a cottage at Portobello, and became acquainted with the Otago Peninsula landscape. It was not until 1973, now married and expecting her first child, that she had the chance to develop the painting she had earlier envisaged.

Mangaweka shows the influence of Rita Angus, an artist White greatly admired, in its stylised linear forms, flattened space and brilliant light. It is structured according to a taut, irregular grid, and bisected by the dramatic line of the veranda. White suppresses unnecessary detail, focusing on the crisp geometric form of the building sandwiched between the truck and hills. She signs her name on the door, inscribing herself in the picture and alluding to the painter’s role in transforming the way we see the world.

Like much of White’s early work, Mangaweka takes a small slice of small-town New Zealand and transforms it into an archetypal image — a painterly parallel to Sam Hunt’s poetry. The same year as that memorable visit with White, Hunt wrote ‘A Mangaweka road song’, where he tells us the following:
No place more I’d like to bring you than
this one-pub town
approached in low gear down
the gorges through the hills.2

Jill Trevelyan

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Robin White’s Mangaweka effortlessly captures the scenery and feeling of a rural New Zealand town. White knew the Rangitikei town from childhood, and in 1971 her friend, poet Sam Hunt, wrote ‘A Mangaweka road song’, capturing the town as she remembered it — ‘this one-pub town/approached in low gear down/the gorges through the hills’.(1) The artist’s characteristic composition of layered planes of crisply edged colour is heightened by the strong horizontal lines, particularly the line of the veranda that divides the painting and the shadow that just appears under the Bedford truck.

While White paints what she knows and feels affection for, her aim is not simply to produce faithful copies of real landscapes. She is more concerned with representing places that are overlaid with memory and experience. ‘I’m not concerned with just recording something,’ she wrote in 1977. ‘I take great liberties with the environment, using it to my own ends. I’ve always been conscious that painting is fundamentally an abstract thing.’(2)

White’s depiction of her local inhabited landscape has affinities with the New Zealand regionalist painting tradition. She acknowledges a particular connection with Rita Angus, citing her appreciation of both Angus’s work and her dedication as a woman artist. Along with her contemporaries Richard Killeen and Ian Scott, White was taught by Colin McCahon at Elam School of Fine Arts, and she credits McCahon as another important influence on her development and commitment to her art.

Motivated by the wish to make her imagery more affordable and accessible, White taught herself to screenprint after moving to Bottle Creek, north of Wellington, in 1969. She frequently made screenprints after paintings, including Mangaweka, and has noted, ‘If I get a good image, then I like to reproduce it. To confine it to one painting, one oil, is to block it off from other people’.(3) In 1982 White and her family moved to the Republic of Kiribati where she continued to make art, working almost exclusively with woodcut prints as the materials were more readily available. White returned to New Zealand in 1999, and she continues to make artworks in a variety of media.

Charlotte Huddleston

This essay originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009).

1. Sam Hunt, ‘A Mangaweka road song’, in Sam Hunt, Collected poems 1963–1980, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 63.
2. Robin White, ‘Art and conservation are synonymous’, Art New Zealand, no. 7, Spring 1977, p. 40.
3. Robin White, quoted in Patrick Æ Hutchings ‘Young Contemporary New Zealand Realists’, Art International, vol. 17, 1973, p. 20.