Enter the garden
Christchurch-based artist Darryn George’s exhibition, In the Garden Where We First Met, will be on display at Queenstown’s Milford Galleries until the end of June. The eye-catching artworks reflect his religious faith and his Ngāpuhi culture.
Darryn’s previous work used a lot of geometric shapes and mainly featured red, white and black, but his newer style has evolved to include bright bold colours, Aotearoa’s native birds and different textures. The results of this shift is the latest collection, which showcases the artist’s rendition of The Garden of Eden, with a dash of New Zealand flavour to it through the flora and fauna depicted.
“It’s kind of based on the Garden of Eden, as if a child was walking into the Garden of Eden and trying to describe what they were seeing,” says Darryn. “There is a sense of playfulness and innocence – you know how a child draws and it’s quite naive and out of scale, but they’re colourful – I had this idea of painting innocence and joy. It’s not accurate, but it’s all about trying to get a feeling across.”
The hope is that the paintings spark joy to those viewing them and Darryn also likes when people bring their own interpretations to his paintings. Previously, his work featured a lot of sharp lines and square shapes that had a bit of a Māori feel to them – it required patience and precision – Darryn was wanting to do something a little more free, which is how the art has developed into what we now see.
“I basically did a word list of what’s the opposite of what I’m doing right now, and that’s it. That’s the sort of strategy I use quite a lot, just whatever you’re doing, do the reverse of it and see what comes out of it. I decided that it was all about sharp lines, so I’m going to use crayons so I can’t get sharp lines. It was really black and white, so I’m going full on colour. It was abstract, so I’m going to go figurative. It was these really sophisticated paint services and chemical processes, so I thought, I’m just going to go really basic and use child-like materials – there’s crayons and there was squirting paint out of tubes and potato stamps. That kind of grew the style.”
Darryn says he was then watching the news and noticed that it was a lot of doom and gloom, which is where the idea of doing something about innocence came along. The current artworks are a reaction to what he used to do six or seven years ago and now, some of his older techniques can be seen to be sneaking back into the work.
Darryn George’s In the Garden Where We First Met exhibition will run until 27 June at Milford Galleries Queenstown.
