Artwork Overview
Unpretentious suburban or small-town buildings, the backbone of New Zealand's recent architectural history, have pride of place in many of Robin White's New Zealand landscape paintings. This little local fish-and-chip shop, threatened now no doubt by international fast-food chains, has a quiet, unsentimental dignity and charm. White also works extensively as a printmaker, often repeating motifs from her paintings. Elizabeth Eastmond commented of her prints: 'These images of the New Zealand landscape, some with its provincial buildings, have a quality of clarity, simplification and concentration, that has made them emblematic to many of a perceived "essential" New Zealandness'. A similar essential character is seen by many in the works of Rita Angus, an artist whom Robin White admires. As a child White remembers being taken by her mother to this Gallery where she saw, among other things, Rita Angus's Portrait of Betty Curnow (page 102). She later said, 'That portrait of Betty Curnow has a presence to it - it's always at the back of my mind'. The example of Angus as a determined, committed woman artist was also important: 'I looked at her and thought, if she can do it, so can I'. In 1982 Robin White and her family moved to Kiribati, where her principal medium is woodcut prints which reflect her experience of village life in the Central Pacific. (from The Guide, 2001)