Wainui, Akaroa 1943

Rita Angus created Wainui, Akaroa in watercolor and pencil. It’s like she mixed together two different ways of seeing to make one painting, one objective, one interpretive, one graphic, one painterly. I think it's about how she thinks about how she sees. Look at the concentric lines of the hills. Each one is so carefully laid down, describing the shape of the earth. And the way she makes the trees with little strokes, it’s almost pointillist. I feel like she's looking really, really hard at the landscape and then working out how to translate it on the page. It reminds me that painting is really thinking! The physical process of layering on colour becomes a way of understanding space and place. Rita Angus is building something solid from seeing.