Strictly for the birds

By LINDA HERRICK Arts editor

A painting in Hamish Foote's Lopdell House exhibition portrays the artist, a dazed look on his face, looking up at a bird in a tree on Kawau Island. It is titled Visitation, and it was inspired by something that happened to Foote - not on Kawau but in his own backyard in inner-city Auckland.

The 40-year-old artist, whose recent works have been concerned with the survival and arrival of bird species in New Zealand, had just finished painting a kea for a solo show. It was dusk, and Foote was in his back garden. "I saw this big brown bird climbing around the plum tree, eating plums and looking very laidback."

It was a kaka, the fully protected native parrot rarely seen in urban areas and the first live one Foote had seen. "It was one of those experiences that reconfigure you. The next evening it came back and flew in lazy circles a couple of metres above my head. It really touched me."

Foote, who had been researching the kea for the solo show, had read of how the sight of two kea flying overhead during Maori expeditions to find pounamu was regarded as a good omen. "So I saw this kaka as maybe I'm on the right track. Anyway, it was pretty neat."

The kaka omen seems to have worked. The Lopdell House show is the visual element of Foote's doctoral submission, gathering together around 30 paintings, most of which have been exhibited and are now in private collections.

Exotica Indigenis Immixta is the culmination of years of work for Foote, who graduated from Elam in 1995 with a masters in stone lithography. At the time, he didn't know how to paint.

He taught printmaking at Elam for a couple of years, then his passion for gardening eventually led him to the department of landscape and plant science at Unitec, where he teaches "visual communication" - landscape design drawing.

When Foote left Elam, he no longer had access to its lithographic presses. He decided to teach himself to paint, using the instructions at the back of Roger Blackley's reproduction of Alfred Sharpe's Hints for Landscape Students in Water-colour (which was first printed in the New Zealand Herald in 1880-82).

"I taught myself using his techniques, his colours and his styles, which is why these paintings have a 19th-century feel about them."

The Lopdell House show has four elements, beginning with a study of Governor George Grey and his bizarre 1862 Garden of Eden experimentation on Kawau, where he introduced exotic species such as zebra, wallabies and monkeys, and exported many native botanical and zoological specimens to England.

The images reflect Foote's interest in the style of the Renaissance. The Allegorical Triumph of Sir George, a painting of Grey trotting across Kawau in a zebra-drawn carriage, mirrors Piero della Francesca's 1465 Allegorical Triumph of the Duke of Montefeltro, which is held in the Uffizi in Florence.

Foote's admiration for della Francesca threads into the next element of the show, Birds, where he profiles native and exotic species in the manner of the Italian painter's Federico de Montefeltro.

The environment in the bird "portraits" is as significant as the origin of the birds. Hence, Rainbow Lorikeet, an introduced pest which competes aggressively for food with native birds, gazes towards Bastion Pt, "a potent reminder of some of the ramifications of colonisation", Foote explains. In contrast, his Kea sits amid a deforested, erosion-ravaged land.

Next in the group comes Insects, six images of species portrayed in an iconic shape of a quatrefoil or hexametric, depending on their biological structure - a compositional strategy also linked to the Renaissance and carried through to this day.

There is the benevolent insect, the chorus cicada, referred to by Maori as "the Singing Birds of Rehua". And then there is the problematic, aggressive German wasp. Somewhere in-between is the humble bumble bee.

Extinct Species is Foote at his most melancholic. A giant eagle (Harpagornis moorei) sweeps across the Valley of the Eagle in south Canterbury, where ancient rock drawings depict species we will never see again.

There is a painting of a huia feather, a bird treasured as sacred yet wiped out because of that very preciousness. There is the moa and the albatross Manu antquus. Foote has been to the valley where the eagles used to soar, and seen the rock drawings. "It was a haunting, spooky place."

Foote acknowledges he is following an interest established by artists ranging from Banks to Kinder, and from Binney to Hammond. "If you're going to deal with birds, Don Binney is the New Zealand touchstone. Bill Hammond's bird works are exquisite and touching."

But he is far too modest about himself, despite the fact his work is coveted. (Note, again, that most of the works in this show come from private collections.) "I am such a tedious, slow, obsessive painter," he groans.

"They take me a very long time, and my ideas far outweigh my output. Nevertheless, the ideas just keep coming up. Ideas are like a piece of string. You hold it and you reel it in and up come other things attached to it."

Exhibition

* What: Exotica Indigenis Immixta, by Hamish Foote

* Where and when: Lopdell House Gallery, 418 Titirangi Rd, Titirangi; until March 14