Layers upon landscapes

Laurence Berry with 'Wellington's Fault'. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

I tell Laurence Berry of my prejudice against paintings with writing on them - something I put down to being an unfortunate legacy of Colin McCahon to New Zealand art - and the interview almost ends before it begins.

"It never entered my thinking," Berry explodes, shaved head swivelling around, his wiry body bristling with barely contained energy.

"I don't think I have seen more than two McCahon paintings in my life.

"While we have all these subliminal influences in the way we move and think and talk, when it comes to producing the work it does not necessarily mean those are powerful, controlling, dominating influences, so I would not see McCahon as an influence."

Indeed, playing "spot the influence" in Berry's work is not productive. Over two decades of painting the landscape, he has built a range of expressive techniques, but in the end technique is "what you do, not what you do, not the focus of the work".

Nor does Berry accept terms like post-modernism to describe his practice of layering texts, maps and other graphic elements on top of his paintings.

"Post-modernism, conceptualism, those are loaded terms constructed by non-artists to describe what artists are doing. I don't give a toss about those terms, they are meaningless as far as I am concerned.

"I have been painting longer than conceptualism and post-modernism has been in New Zealand."

Berry places himself squarely in the romantic tradition, where the emotional response of the artist is supreme.

"My painting is based on my own experience of place," he says. "The graphics came out of a need I had when I was in Fiordland among these huge landscapes - inhumanly big - and I found my wife's grandfather had been a surveyor who had got to the top of these places where I could hardly see the summit.

"Putting in text blocks was a way of putting those stories in front of people. I don't see my work as text-based or map-based.

"Every one of those things I see as legitimate stories, stories attached to place, and I am very strongly attached to place - I think New Zealanders are.

"Hobson did this here, Hone Heke did that there. By overlaying stories, you bring in multiple other realities. I think these are simple pictures which discuss the whole idea of reality created through the retelling of stories.

"Every landscape [painting] is a story about the reality of a place and it goes into a great big jumble of stories about that place."

Berry's was born in Porirua in 1958. He trained as a teacher in Wellington, majoring in drama, art and music, but lasted one term in the classroom.

He moved north in 1984 with wife Ellie Smith, settling at Urquhart's Bay near Whangarei Heads.

Here he found his landscape."Northland has an untameable nature which is epitomised by guys like Murupaenga from Ngati Whatua and Hongi Hika from Ngapuhi."

Travelling through Taitokerau with kaumatua Taipare Munroe, Berry caught a glimpse of another landscape. "Standing somewhere like Ruapekapeka, Taipare would look across at what look like nondescript hills and tell me about those places and the people who lived and died there - they are with him all the time."

After doing "tens of thousands of drawings", Berry says he no longer records the landscape in situ.

"I don't look for any visual image. I can't sit there and draw because it seems to get in the way of being aware of the totality of a place. The underlying landscape image is what I am left with after I visit a place.

"I very rarely go to a place and look at it for painting, but I would challenge anyone to sit in front of those paintings and pick much wrong with it."

On that challenge we part.

Exhibition

*What: Unsettled Land, by Laurence Berry
*Where and when: Oedipus Rex Gallery, Khartoum Place, to May 6