Full circle

The catalogue reproduced above was printed for the first exhibition of what would become known as Gordon Walters’ koru paintings at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery - save for the painting Te Whiti which was entered in the 1966 Hay’s Prize earlier in the year. By clicking the image hopefully you can read Gordon’s statement, but in case: “my work is an investigation of positive/negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms. The forms I use have no descriptive value in themselves and are used solely to demonstrate relations. I believe that dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements.”

Many of these paintings were created in Walters’ studio in the Rutland Flats in Brougham Street, Mt Victoria in Wellington which has a special interest for us because we used to live just down the road. Let’s Google the connections. A search on Brougham and Rutland brings up the Wordsworth poem Song at the feast of Brougham Castle. It recounts the story of Henry Lord Clifford who slew the Earl of Rutland. The poem includes the following two lines, which we think neatly bring us back to Gordon Walters. “And glancing, gleaming, dark or bright, / Moved to and fro, for his delight.”
Lower image: Rutland flats, Brougham Street, Mt Victoria, Wellington 2007