Timon Maxey's Whanganui landscapes on display at A Gallery

Timon Maxey's studio is also housed at 85 Glasgow St. Photo / Bevan Conley

Whanganui painter Timon Maxey set about creating a series of acrylics of Whanganui landmarks less than a month ago and the fruits of his labour are now on display.

"Local Landscapes" is made up of 13 works that include the Durie Hill Tower, Virginia Lake, the Cooks Gardens steps, and Fisherman's Rock at Kai Iwi Beach.

His final painting, of Raukawa Falls on the Mangawhero River, was only completed at 11pm the night before the exhibition opened.

Maxey, who was born in Whanganui, said some of the paintings held a particularly special significance to him.

"I really enjoyed doing a series of notable scenes that people will relate to," Maxey said.

"Some of them are particularly important to me, like 'Kaikokopu Sunset', which is just down the road from us, and I drive past it every day.

"Then there's 'Fisherman's Rock', which is about a third of the size of how it was when I was at school.

"We used to climb up it, and at high tide the waves would come and smash against it. We'd jump off the rock on to the big stacks of water that had built up underneath."

Maxey said a lot of thought went into the photographs his paintings were based on.

"I'm pretty finicky about my photos.

"I like to get them perfectly framed, and I try and encapsulate all the scene that I might want to get a photo out of. Then I usually crop it down to get the perfect part.

"It's hard to get a good vantage point of Virginia Lake, for example, so I went to all the flash houses on top of the hill that look down on it. There are some brilliant views from there.

"For the Durie Hill Tower, I searched around for a long time to get what I thought was the perfect view. I had to go right back along the fence and try and get those palm trees in the shot."

Rivers, waterfalls, rapids, and wilderness were scenes Maxey said he particularly enjoyed painting.

"I'm a bit annoying to go on mountainbike rides in nice places with, because I keep stopping all the time.

"I can't help it. If I see a nice scene then I have to snap it."

Maxey, whose studio is in the same building as A Gallery, said his art had become "pretty full-time" in the last 18 months or so.

"I'm doing a lot of cubist work for my dealer gallery in Auckland, which is the International Art Centre.

"This year I really need to go for it with them, because I haven't been able to give them as much as they want.

"That is going to build my career, so I really need to concentrate on it.

Maxey works solely in acrylic.

"You sort of learn all the idiosyncrasies of a particular kind of paint, and the way to use it. I've developed my own little techniques as well.

"I don't use oil. I could, I guess, but I just haven't got into it. I'd have to completely reskill, and start again.

"That sounds a bit counterproductive."

His new exhibition will run concurrently with another in Gallery 85 next door - "Take a Bag" - in which local artists such as Andrea Gardner, Tejomani Earl, Trevor Fry and Helen Budd created works with only a paper bag as a starting point in their creation process.

• Both exhibitions are now open to the public at A Gallery and Gallery 85 at 85 Glasgow St.