Michael Smither Painter, Trish Gribben, Ron Sang Publications, 2004, p. 96 & p. 123

*Please note measurements provided in the book in reference to the plate on p. 96 are incorrect, please see cataloguing above for correct measurements

1969, when he turned 30, was the year Michael Smither left New Plymouth in March to take up residence in “Blarney Castle”, a tiny family-owned mud brick crib near Patearoa on the Maniopoto Plains of Central Otago. It was an area he already knew well: he had lived there for most of 1962, the year before he married, and childhood holidays had been spent shooting rabbits with his cousins nearby. In the series of paintings he created there, a layering of nostalgic memory onto the flaxen hills is combined with an evocation of the work of Rita Angus. Her father had been born in Naseby, and she returned to the area frequently, making works which rendered the folded ranges iconic. Angus died in 1970, the year that Smither held the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, and he painted 14 Otago landscapes contained within cross-shaped forms as memorials to her achievement. He recalled later how the experience of the year spent living in Patearoa with his wife and young children had a huge impact on him: “I was like Man Alone walking around in the wilderness, the Sinai desert … Living there, I felt very strong connections to the land, to the sensuous shapes and structures and colours that were so different from Taranaki.”

In this painting, the rounded forms of the hills are illuminated by directional light and look like the hips and shoulders of human bodies slumbering under a soft blanket, while complementary colours of straw yellow and cerulean-blue creating a high-contrast, vibrant effect.

Land and sky are separated by the Rock and Pillar Range, which gives Patearoa its name. Depicted as a garnish of icing sugar peaks, these mountains pile up along the horizon, reflecting the azure of the sky in the shadows which fall across their icy slopes, denoting the intensity of the climate and consequent harsh conditions for those who would try to get the land to yield its riches. As Justin Paton remarks, “the symbolic key to the Central series is right there on the surface, in the very colour that suffuses his landscapes. In painting after painting, it is as if the gold that miners once sought in deep seams has been drawn to the very surface of the hills.” Smither’s own grandfather had struck it rich here, using a sluice gun to blast the faces of the gravelly hills with bursts of water. The race that delivered the water to this arid area from many miles away appears as a ribbon of blue in deep shadow on the left in this work, disappearing over the crest of the hill in one direction while the old horse and cart track arcs away to the right. These marks of human incursion encapsulate the divergence of extraction of resources and conservation of the environment. Smither later recalled how his “feelings for the environment and our destruction of it” intensified during his Central Otago sojourn, and he felt a sadness and exhilaration brought on by the vast space, distilling his response into two short sentences: “Everything is so simple. A land very close to desert in nature.”

LINDA TYLER

Hills of Gold: Michael Smither’s Central Otago, curated by Justin Paton, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2000

Private Collection, Central Otago