ILLUSTRATED
Gregory O’Brien, DON BINNEY: FLIGHT PATH, Auckland University Press, 2023, p. 332

Few artists have shaped New Zealand’s visual identity as decisively as Don Binney. From the 1960s, he established a visual language at once formal and deeply personal.

Waitangiroto 21-11-1 (2006) belongs to a late sequence revisiting sites of lasting importance to the artist. The kōtuku, long emblematic of rarity, stands poised within a landscape distilled to broad, assured planes. Tonal restraint and subtle surface modulation create a quiet intensity, the eye drawn first to the pair of kōtuku in the foreground before rising to the commanding presence of the spoonbill beyond.

Writing in Don Binney: Flight Path (Auckland University Press, 2003), Gregory O’Brien recounts Binney’s visit to Okarito, where the rare sighting of a kōtuku and spoonbill together inspired the work illustrated here. In Waitangiroto 21-11-1, Binney’s vocabulary is fully refined. Detail is pared back; presence is not. Land, light and avian form exist in measured accord, a lucid and mature statement of an artist returning, with conviction, to the places that shaped him.

Beyond the Road, The Diversion Gallery, Picton, July - August 2007

Private Collection, Wellington
Purchased from The Diversion Gallery, Picton, 2007