Art on a roll as exhibition visits schools

ON THE ROAD: Paul Forrest at Masterton Primary School, talking about a work by Masterton artist Harry Watson called Focus, a 2008 oil on wood.

Thirty-seven tonnes of "transformer" truck has been rolling a million dollars worth of Kiwi art through Masterton schools this week during the final visit of the Real Art Roadshow to Wairarapa.

Roadshow educator and co-director Paul Forrest said the travelling spectacle spends two to three days at each school. Sessions last from 20 minutes to an hour or more, with the art truck coming from Wellington to Wairarapa, this week visiting Solway Primary School and Masterton Primary School before heading to Wairarapa College tomorrow.

He said the Roadshow travelled through smaller centres and focused on "remote and rural places, not the city where they have so much on offer", although the size of the truck, which transforms into a gallery and living spaces for himself and the driver, sometimes prevented visits to smaller schools.

"This is really taking the art to the kids. You can't get the true sense or nature of some of these artworks - the thickness of the paint or the scale - any other way.

"In a book or on screen you don't get that. You have to see them in the flesh to get that true resonance with it."

Mr Forrest, a self-taught artist living in Wellington, says he relishes the 10 weeks he had spent during each of the past five years travelling with the art truck as "an educator and a seed planter of epiphanies".

"It's about providing a new way of looking because with contemporary art you have to think outside of the square, outside of the box, to get your head around it. And that's for everybody not just kids.

"I introduce to the kids a new way of seeing really. Every single piece of art in here has layers and layers of meanings or interpretations, and not just what the artist is saying," he said.

"It's all empowering and for an hour after school I stay open, so the kids can brings their parents and say 'look, this is what this is about'," Mr Forrest said.

"There will be lives changed seeing something like this - the children or maybe even their parents - because having an epiphany is a neural pathway being fused and it's not training them to be artists but training them to think, to see something in a new and unexpected way.

"I've taken my own kids to art galleries for years and being an artist I want to nurture people's abilities to look and read art and admire it."

There were 72 artworks aboard the truck in a wide range of mediums that comprises about half the Roadshow collection, he said. The work was rotated for each trip and this time around included a woodcut titled The Fisherman Loses His Way by Masterton artist Robin White and the Focus sculpture by Masterton carver Harry Watson.

It takes three years to complete a nationwide tour, he said, and the truck in its present incarnation had toured the South Island and was on its last circuit of the North Island.

Roadshow founder and artist Fiona Campbell had pledged to tour the art collection for a decade and the tour this year was the last for the mobile gallery, Mr Forrest said.

The collection had been valued at up to a million dollars and it was hoped the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa would take over the operation, boosted with its own collection, and "become a truly national art gallery and take the art out to the people".