Soft pastels Alford’s medium of choice

ACROSS THE BAY: This painting by Zoe Alford is called “Bunny Tails, Midway Beach.” Picture supplied

Lightscapes, a solo exhibition of works by local painter Zoe Alford, opens at Tairāwhiti Museum tomorrow.

The collection of new paintings includes images of seascapes, beaches, farmland, a vineyard, Eastland Port, and the old Midway Surf Lifesaving Club.

A multi-award-winning artist, Alford is the vice president of the Pastel Artists of of New Zealand, which promotes pastel as a fine art medium to the general public.

Her artworks have been exhibited in national and international collections.

“Painting for me is an intellectual challenge,” says Alford on her website. “It is a process of taking something apart, examining its individual components and understanding how they work together to create an overall image.”

Alford is firmly attached to realism in her artwork, but a close look reveals almost abstract patterns — reflections in water, seas of grass, slumped terracettes, the reef.

All such patterns are rendered with care to create the overall sensation of a private glimpse at a moment in time when beauty is revealed by the light.

Alford says over the past 20 years she has found that using soft pastels gives her the “best chance” of conveying her interpretations.

“It’s highly tactile — a marriage of drawing and painting. Because I don’t have to mix colours before application (although I can on the painting’s surface) and I don’t have to wait for the pigments to dry, I’m able to work quickly, gesturally, and creatively.”

She said pastels were especially user-friendly for sketching “en plein air”.

“The pigments are as bright as I could wish, and the pastels themselves invite unique mark-making impossible to achieve with liquid pigments like acrylics or oils.

“The crystal structure of the pigments in pastels means I can create light in my paintings which is much more than an illusion, with the ambient light actually refracting off the crystals.”

Her paintings are already historical, she says.

In the past two years, while Alford has been working on her recent collection, the Midway SLS club has gone, and so too has the Waimatā tugboat. Waiteata Park now has riparian under-planting, and the face of Te Kurī o Pāoa Young Nick’s Head is always changing.

Although her intention wasn’t to record scenes of te Tairāwhiti for the purpose of documenting them, these works represent another chapter in the tracing of local history.

“In the landscapes around Tairāwhiti (and elsewhere) at various times of the day and year, I find fascinating aspects that capture my eye and evoke a response in me,” she writes on her website.

“My attempt to capture these aspects and sensations in my paintings comes from the desire to preserve and share my experience with others. It’s an enjoyable challenge to interpret the scene in a way that conveys this.”

Lightscapes exhibition opening, Tairawhiti Museum, tomorrow Friday March 31 at 5.30pm.