WELLESLEY BINDING
ARTIST BIO
Wellesley Binding emigrated from Australia in 1974 and has been working as an artist in New Zealand since then, exhibiting in numerous public and private galleries and award shows. In 2003 he completed his MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and is now a Fine Arts Lecturer at EIT in Hawkes Bay.
In Binding’s words, "Like many painters today, I wander the border region between figurative painting and abstract painting, between narrative content and formal proposition, between image and mark, between illusion and paint. Contradictions. Many painters tend toward one of each extreme, in a logic of painting as object v painting as a narrative vehicle. I am happy to be a middle man. This is a safe place for painting to ‘bide its time’, tick over, and hope for something interesting to turn up... I work with and within those contradictions; they seem to resemble the same contradictions within experience itself. I work by a rule: A theme or narrative is a necessary fiction in order to get painting, and paint in a certain way, the way it turns out. That makes decisions about process and what to put in and what to leave out a nervous procedure. Whatever a painting may be ‘about’, a painting for me is a unique argument for, and instance of, a certain way of doing things. From time to time that changes."