Artwork Information

Theo Schoon trained at the renowned Rotterdam Art Academy from 1931-35. Arriving in New Zealand in 1939, he met the artists Rita Angus and Gordon Walters who were impressed by his knowledge of painting, sculpture, photography and printmaking. His fascination with experimental processes, and his ability to spend months in the open in field research, became legendary. The Māori, for Schoon, were what made New Zealand an unrivalled place; he was obsessed with Māori creativity, yet his fascination was not always welcomed as he sometimes intimated that he could predict the underlying principles of Māori design. Schoon felt the need to create an art that reacted to Māori people as well as to Māori places. He hoped 'to meet another culture, on its own ground with adequate understanding, a warm heart and sympathetic hands.' When he first moved to Rotorua in 1950 he began a photo-series that he called his 'thermals', a subject to which he would return over the next 25 years. Schoon laboriously observed pools of molten mud over many months; after establishing which specific light and weather conditions created the patterns he liked, he would slowly expose his negatives. Often the mud's volume, depth, and shape are seen to interact and suggest an eroticised Nature. (from The Guide, 2001)