WILD AND PRECIOUS

Wild And Precious 

Although Helen Ollivier is now a committed and accomplished landscape painter, when she began her years of study at Elam School of Fine Arts, she was already primed by years of life drawing from the age of 15 to be a figurative artist. That mode of drawing perhaps wasn’t lost when she subsequently embraced landscape as a genre. You can feel the formal rhythms, the sense of movement and physicality in the way that she handles the rippling slopes and winding valleys of her scenes. An indication of just how strongly that drawing practice embedded itself within her artistic practice is that Ollivier now paints immediately onto her boards with confident, intuitive sweeps of underpainting, dispensing with the pencil altogether. “We were taught to not always be drawing with line, but rather to draw with light and shadow. Form rather than edge.”

The proofs of this approach are abundant in Ollivier’s approach to landscape, where shadows serve almost as the impetus or the structure around which the image takes shape. “I tend to be drawn to shape, to forms and folds, in quite an abstract way. I generally avoid ‘landmark’ paintings that emphasize single subjects in a picture. I prefer to involve the whole pictorial space.” And certainly, looking at her work, you become conscious of the varied journeys your eye is taking through the composition, of the captivating details and nuances to be found within it. Ollivier is a keen hiker and this way of getting right inside her real-life subject is what defines her approach; “When I go into a landscape, I find little treasures, visual relationships that attract me. That’s what I look for, rather than, you know, postcard views.”

Ollivier admires the work of seminal New Zealand landscape painters Rita Angus, Robyn White and Don Binney (by whom she was taught). “I love their work for being so local and so personal, and for honouring the land, of being aware of it, how privileged we are to live here, and how precious it is.” That awareness is registered in the way Ollivier paints. Her colour palette is geared towards those times of the day, so fleeting, when the shadows are long, and the land’s deeper, moodier qualities leap into high relief. And it’s here where abstract qualities enter her otherwise representational art, in the way this artist expertly orchestrates colour, those indigos, purples and pinks that exist in the shadows, and sculpts them within geographical phenomena.  

And it’s also in that sculpting, where Ollivier’s distinct hand transforms the raw data of the photographs she takes for reference into an image that exists independently of its subject. “I am not a photographer! My friends are often amazed and wonder how I can turn such a shitty photo into this amazing painting! But I’m not interested in just copying. The photo is just a rough starting point. It’s the interpretation, the performance of it in paint that makes the process and the work meaningful.”

It comes down to those details and nuances that develop over time and practice in the studio, day in day out.

“I use a very old blown-out brush rather than a precise, fine brush, even in the details, because the way I handle it makes the work more energetic, more textural. Every new painting is an experiment, a development.” As focused as she is on the finer details of her often impressively detailed and ambitiously scaled pictures, she is constantly aware of the need to avoid painting too precisely or finely. It’s a balance Ollivier handles with impressive skill. “It’s got to have me in it. And it can’t look overworked.”