Park, Turi
Artist Statement
In June 1998 I became aware of my father Geoff Park’s study of our notions of the picturesque scene and it’s impact on the shaping of the New Zealand landscape.
Geoff had come to visit me in London where I was working as a freelance graphic designer. We hired a car and took the opportunity to visit the ancestral landscapes of our family. My grandfather hails from Egremont, now a fairly nondescript town on the Western edge of Cumbria, the English Lake District. This town is one of many left in the wake of iron-mining for the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution. We also explored the places so familiar and inspiring to Wordsworth and Ruskin.
While lunching on a grassy knoll in Grasmere, overlooking Lake Rydal Water Geoff whipped out a replica Claude Glass on loan from the Wordsworth Museum in the poet’s Dove Cottage. At the time I remember thinking it an eccentric historical oddity. However with Geoff’s help I have come to understand this wee oval mirror with it’s tobacco coloured glass, designed to reflect and capture ideal scenes while picnicking, and fill them with luminosity, as the precursor to the camera. The Claude Glass represents the picturesque ideal that has had such a remarkable impact since on how we see ‘scenes’.
The Claude Glass and the view of the New Zealand lake Waikaremoana set within it emerged as the cover design for Geoff’s recent book “Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua. The graphic idea of the Claude Glass on the cover is challenged by it’s modern equivalent the digital camera on the back. Which I’m sure we still approach with a sub-conscious awareness of the ideal scene when recording a moment in a landscape and saving it to data card.
Exactly 10 years later I found myself staying in a villa in Citerna, on the border between Umbria and Tuscany in Italy. The same landscape that had inspired Claude to paint so well that the Claude glass was developed and named in admiration.
It was Claude’s work that also inspired JMW Turner. So much that it was Turner’s dying wish to have his tribute work; The Dido Building, Carthage; hung next to Claude’s The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba in London’s National Gallery, where they are still together today.
More than any other painter, the work and painting techniques of Turner have been a revelation to me.
This show is really the result of a series of happy coincidences. As a painter learning all the many subtleties that oils demand, being in this special part of Italy was like being a gourmet there for the food. Every town is filled to dripping with paintings, and just up the road was Florence and it’s Uffizi Gallery. I use colours on my palette that are named after places that we explored:
Sienna, from a pigment mined just out of Siena, Tuscany
Umber, originally from mineral deposits in the Umbrian mountains
Naples Yellow is exactly the colour of Italian summer sun on plaster or dry straw.
Venetian Red is a red ochre used to paint the first imprimatura stage of a painting
The Italian images are not intended to be imitations of Claude’s, nor Turner’s, but simply scenes that I liked while in the Tuscan countryside. This was a rare chance to paint the beauty of this landscape and the unforgettable light or chiaroscuro of this famous Italian countryside that has inspired so many others.
The Italian images are all painted in oil on canvas, and loosely follow the Venetian Technique of painting made famous by Titian, Tintoretto, Canaletto, Caravaggio, Leonardo and others. This process of painting starts with an imprimatura, or dark ground, then opaque colours and finally sfumato or delicate layers of glazes to create atmosphere and capture subtle light effects.
I would like to thank my father Geoff Park for his depth of knowledge, enthusiasm and the “Theatre Country” idea, which is his*. Thanks to my lovely Mum for her patience, and to Richard, Frances, Andrew, Niki and Bump Cathie for making the trip to Citerna not just possible but a wonder-filled pilgrimage to the source of this ideal world. And most of all to Jane, Georgia and Jack for letting me paint when I should be with them.
Turi Park, September 2008.
*Theatre Country : essays on landscape and whenua, Geoff Park (2000) is published by Victoria University Press and is available from Unity Books in Wellington, or booksellers nationwide.
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