Arrowtown (sketch for 'Central Otago') 1953

Rita Angus made this watercolour sketch for 'Central Otago' at an unknown date, and it’s like she’s handing us a way of seeing, gently coaxing it into being. The colours are pure and limpid, like a memory just forming. Looking at the way she layers washes of colour, you get this real sense of the landscape breathing through her. There’s a diagonal slash of blue coming in from the left – is it a river, or a road? It cuts across the ochre foreground, drawing your eye up to the mountains. I love the way she uses these little dots of green and brown to suggest the texture of the land. It’s a kind of shorthand, like she’s whispering secrets to the paper. I see echoes of Cezanne in her treatment of the landscape, but with a lightness all her own. It’s like she’s saying, “Look, the world is beautiful, but it’s also messy and unresolved, and that’s okay.”