Driven

Last year we posted a photograph of Don Driver still at work in his studio. We visited Don this week and took some pics and, as you can see from the Angelina Jolie poster on the top of the heap, Don is still able to work on his collages. While the large works that have dominated his production have probably come to an end, an exhibition is opening next week at Aratoi the Wairarapa Museum of Art and History in Masterton that features many of his large banner works. Driver was among the first group of New Zealand artists to sense the swing in attention from European to American art as artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and later Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns picked up the European tradition and gave it a shake. For Don Driver that turnaround resulted in works like his painted reliefs (there is an exhibition of these powerful works in development by the Dunedin Art Gallery), the constructions of the 1960s and 1970s culminating in works like Lawn cuttings (Te Papa) and Produce (Govett-Brewster). Remarkably, classic works from these years are still stored in the studio.
Image: Don Driver's studio September 2009 (click image to enlarge)