Songs launch from canvas

Artist Felicity Priest is still living in Wanganui Opera Week as she refines paintings that had their beginnings during the opera school last year.

Priest has her work on display at The Green Bench Project Room upstairs at 67 Guyton St in Wanganui. She'll be working there from 10am to 3pm most days for the next few weeks. She's looking after the project room.

During the New Zealand Opera School in Wanganui in 2011, Priest sat in on classes and drew and photographed what was happening. Many of those drawings and a few finished paintings are on the walls of the project room. Two of the paintings were on display in the Sarjeant Gallery during the emerging artists' lunchtime concert this year.

Some of the drawings she did last year have the words of tutors or students scrawled on them: "You've got to be a Ferrari, not an MX5. You're driving an Austin 7," said one tutor, and another, simply, "Lilt".

Priest loved her time at the school and wanted to capture the singers' operatic aspirations and the process of getting them there. She also wanted to celebrate the success of the school itself.

The master classes, especially, demonstrated the process and mechanism of singing.

One of the tutors, Professor Paul Farrington, told her he visualised what was happening in the singers' voice boxes as he worked with them.

Last year, Priest painted the portrait of student countertenor Stephen Diaz, and he sang while she worked.

"The house was just ringing with the sound, and that definitely informed the painting," she said.

Her aim was to capture the power and energy in the moment.

"The live sitting is very much a response to everything that's happening in the moment, and it's not just a visual thing," she said.

Priest has been interested in the relationship between sound and vision since her student days, and wrote her art school thesis on it.

"I've had singing lessons in the past, and I'm very interested in the process. Opera is a very complex art form, and this is my way, as a visual artist, of exploring it."

After absorbing all those sights, sounds and interactions in 2011, Priest wants push the subject further.

"A longer-term project might be bringing the two art forms together in some way, like a performance piece. This is the first step.

"I'm moving toward the fusion. I've got no plan, I'm just doing it."

When the project has gelled, she'd like to have a show in Auckland, Wellington and also in Australia.