Toss Woollaston


Woollaston was born in 1910. He is one of the pioneers of modern art in New Zealand, especially with his early landscapes and figurative paintings of the 1930s.
Woollaston's work was based in ordinary landscape. He had an unusual approach to its treatment though. Instead of using the hard outlines and strong forms of regionalism, he used a far more expressionist approach to line, colour and form. He used this expressionist approach to communicate his emotions. His landscapes have a muddy quality that is at odds with the traditional hard-edged treatment of the landscape which emphasizes clarity of form.

Woollaston enrolled at the Canterbury School of Art, transferred to King Edward Technical College in Dunedin to work with Robert Nettleton Field after seeing Field's work in the 1931 Group Show. He found in Field's own work an inspiration in its lack of concern with traditional concepts like one-point perspective and atmospheric or spatial continuity. He learnt to see painting as an invention by the artist conceived in terms of a two-dimensional surface, that there was "such a thing as independence in painting".
It was via Field in 1932 that Woollaston became aware of the early masters of modernism, especially Cezanne and the Fauves. From these sources plus Field's own style, the freedom with colour, the brightness of the palette and the willingness to leave the strokes and marks readable on the surface also had a major impact.

In 1934 Woollaston met Flora Scales who had studies at the Hans Hofmann school in Germany in the 1920s. He had already seen a few paintings by Flora Scales in Christchurch. These works embodies a discipline of form and structure which went beyond mere attractiveness. This contact stimulated Woollaston to experiment with a dynamic relationship of bold planes of colour. His construction of pictorial space through colour, rather than traditional perspective, reveals the lessons he learnt from Scales. Woollaston came to appreciate the elements of space construction by using a system of rotating and interacting planes based on Hofmann’s analysis of the work of Cezanne. Soon, Woollaston was testing these ideas on the Nelson landscape.

Between 1935*36, the early modernism reveals how Woollaston's style underwent rapid development as he put into practice the theories he had discovered. He experimented further with form and colour.

Mapua is an early work from 1935 which deals with the local landscape and shows the influence of Field, especially in the use of colour patches on the partially unpainted canvas. However, the relaxed handling and natural palette preview Woollaston’s own painting of the late 1930s. Woollaston's landscapes of Mapua, show how he was prepared to organize the surface with outlining and calligraphic strokes to represent objects like trees and roads. He placed emphasis on an expressionist style and the ordinariness of the landscapes that he chose to represent.

The reticence of his colour range grew out of his feelings towards the subtleties of the Mapua landscape and from his practice of painting on warm grey paper, using thinly applied washes of ochre and reddish-brown colours.

Woollaston's paintings may be regarded as being landscapes of feelings, moods and emotions. Woollaston said of Wellington, 1937, that the 'picture was a piece of almost spontaneous painting, and is not so much a likeness of Wellington as a symbol of my reaction to it...... I felt that I must express the actual chaos of Wellington's buildings by an abstract symbol of it.'

The work between 1939--40 is created by modulated contrasts of colour. In 1940s, Woollaston's had a subdued palette of earth colours is used to create imprecise definition of form. Later in 1950s*90s, there is an emphasis on process. Strokes and marks link up across the picture surface to provide a single image. The landscape appears secondary to the expressive use of paint.

Taranaki, 1965, offers an alternative view of Taranaki to the one painted by Perkins. However, it also consists of a monumental and frontal depiction of a single motif. The style that Woollaston evolves here remains consistent in his works of the 1970s and 80s. The painting has an Abstract Expressionist quality. The forms themselves are left imprecise and the content appears to be secondary to the mark-making. The strokes and marks of the paint link up across the picture surface to provide a single undifferentiated image. The painting is expressive in terms of reflecting the mental state of the artist while creating the image.

Toss Woollaston was not interested in reproducing optical vision, but of expressing the emotions that surged within him as he reacted to the total environment. The smears and blobs of paint are seemingly alive with the energy of Nature. As Charles Brasch has referred to Woollaston as being "one of the first to see and paint New Zealand as a New Zealander". Although, Woollaston was very antithesis of being hard-edged and sharply-defined. His statement which a dogmatic nationalist is not likely to quote: "I don't think one must be passionately devoted to New Zealand in order to be a New Zealand painter......"

Woollaston's figure paintings of the mid- to late- 1930s were an important series for him. They treat the figure in an uncompromising manner rarely seen in New Zealand up to this date. Figures from Life, 1936, shows Woollaston to have been the most modernist painter at work in New Zealand in 1936. Woollaston’s aim is not to convey a sense of the individual, but rather an interest in gesture to communicate emotion. The work has similarities to the ‘p'primitivism' of Matisse, Picasso and the German Expressionists. The mask-like qualities of the faces echo Picasso's work of the early 20th Century, especially the style seen in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907.

Portrait of the Artist's Wife was also painted about 1937. As his wife sat at her spinning wheel at Mapua, she provided—as on many other occasions—a model for the painter. But here, underlying the artist’s characteristic freedom of brushwork, there is a more certain solidity which pays homage to Cezanne. As with his landscapes, so with his portraits and figure paintings, Woollaston constantly draws and searches for the telling line, color and form which he feels corresponds to or expresses his emotions towards the subject.

In 1966 he began to paint full-time and from then until the present he as gained recognition as one of the country's leading painters. Woollaston's later paintings of the seventies and eighties have built on the style he evolved in the fifties and sixties rather than challenged or denied it. His most spectacular works of recent times have been large-scale landscapes. These reveal the breadth of Woollaston's painterly qualities on a scale that does them justice.





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