Toss Wollaston, Don Binney, Colin McCahon, Pat Hanly, Ralph
Hotere, Philip Trustrum and Gordon Walters were major beneficiaries.
between Colin McCahon and Ralph
Hotere. He considers the mutually
Ralph
Hotere and Shane Cotton, who happen to be two of Aotearoa/New Zealand's leading artists, are of Ngapuhi extraction.
My guide book said they were good, and an additional reason for visiting Gore was to see its collection of paintings by Ralph
Hotere, the much admired Maori artist who had died just the previous week.
One immediately thinks of Ralph
Hotere's iconic collaborative installation with Bill Culbert, Pathway to the sea--Aramoana 1991, and the work of the mostly Dunedin-based artists and writers in opposition to the proposed aluminium smelter that in the early 1980s threatened the Aramoana salt marsh and mudflats--now a protected wildlife sanctuary.
Ralph
Hotere told me recently that he had been to the funeral of one of our old customers, Allen Percival.
While McCahon's background was Presbyterian, accompanied by a life-long grappling with Catholicism, Ralph
Hotere (Te Aupouri, 1931-2013) emerged from a dense, resonant and remarkably coherent religious milieu, conditioned by both Maori and Roman Catholic influences.
He doesn't 'much regret not having written about Ralph
Hotere' (among others), though you'd have thought
Hotere's three seven-part 'Black Paintings' series from 1968 would have been hearty grist to his transactional mill.
A number of Maori works are included here, ranging from 'When 1 of Fish Eat' by Rowley Habib/Rore Hapipi with illustrations by Ralph
Hotere, to Upper Hutt Posse's 'Tangata Whenua'.
Gow declared there would have been far more national relevance in selecting 'a paua shell work by Ralph
Hotere and Bill Culbert'.