Rediscovering an exotic corner of a small town

James Kirkwood translated photographs into watercolours, then into a series of small paintings. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Tucked into a corner of Hawera's King Edward Park is someone's idea of a Chinese garden.

Overgrown yew trees flank keyhole arches. Across the back wall is a mural lifted from a china plate, the blue, repainted every year, lifting above the white.

Auckland artist James Kirkwood rediscovered the garden last year.

"I used to go there as a kid with my parents, but I'd forgotten about it," he says. "We used to stop there driving through to Stratford to see my great-grandparents, and they would let us out to run off all that childhood energy.

"I was driving past last Christmas and wondered if the garden was still there. I went in and it was exactly the same. It has that New Zealand approach but it still has that crisp chinoiserie approach I had been looking at."

Kirkwood says the subject allowed him to address a complaint from a friend - that he never painted New Zealand subjects - while continuing his interest in chinoiserie, a style which emerged in the 18th century as Western artists tried to imitate Chinese motifs and techniques.

"I picked up on it from the 18th-century perspective, the mystery of the Orient and all their ideas of what it was like, their fantasies. I like the playfulness of the way things are formed and the flat way the Chinese drew which the English picked up and tried to copy. It is about the translation, or mistranslation."

For his show at the Anna Miles Gallery, Kirkwood translated photographs he took that day into watercolours, then into a series of small paintings.

"I crop them in my mind and as I redraw them, so I make sure I am getting three or four paces removed from the actual thing, because I know I'll work on a painting.

"A photo doesn't have enough information. I need to take it down to the drawing stage, work it over in my mind and take it back up. I work out what colours I will use and stick to them, so I have got a pattern idea going as well.

"The subject is just an excuse for me to impose my visual language."

Kirkwood also painted the Ron Sang-designed red pagoda office tower in Wellesley St, flattening out the paintwork.

"I painted it quite dry. I wanted it poppy and crisp and didn't want to give it a romantic look or place it in the context of a city landscape."

Kirkwood graduated from Elam in 1985, and worked for a spell as a set painter and set designer at Mercury Theatre.

His early exhibitions included painstakingly painted post-modern explorations of earlier painting styles, often layering elements from different paintings in the one work.

"I got interested in 18th-century painting, cutting it up, looking at it, the way different artists rendered things, how each thing worked against itself, shuffling round meanings, then started to look at patterns in some of these paintings, zooming in on the work."

A smashed finger left Kirkwood looking for less physical work, and for the past decade he has worked in a wine shop, leaving him less time for painting. That has changed his approach. "I like to have a painting painted in one sitting to maintain the intensity and freshness of the mark."

That doesn't necessarily mean smaller works. The latest show includes two large aerial views of gardens, the shapes quickly sketched in green on green.

While they look like they could be thrown-off drawings, Kirkwood confesses he had to do one four times before he was satisfied.

"To get that right, you have to be in the right frame of mind and be prepared."

Exhibition

* What: Parking, by James Kirkwood
* Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery, 47 High St, to May 28