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Art and conservation are synonymous

ROBIN WHITE

I have my own feelings about the way the environment is handled. I see myself as a recorder of the reality of the situation. For instance, when I was living and teaching in Wellington, in a state housing area, I found my paintings were involved with the area around the school I taught in - where the land was being bulldozed, state houses built, and the harbour filled in. I guess a lot of people saw a protest in my paintings of that time, but that wasn't the intention.

What I paint depends on where I am. When I was teaching at Mana college, there were shops and houses and so on. Out here at Portobello it seems to be hills and seas. When I'm in Auckland, I do drawings or paintings of the people in Auckland. I don't go around just looking for beautiful hills - my work arises out of the situation I'm in.

I don't feel like a colonist. My family has been here for many generations - my father's lineage goes back to the Maori and my mother's goes back to the first settlers in the Bay of Plenty area. I really do feel this is my country. I've got no particular interest in any other artistic heritage and I don't feel I owe anything to what's happened in Britain, America, France or Italy.

ROBIN WHITE, Peninsula Diptych 1972 acrylic (collection of the Manawatu Art Gallery)

I've had a pretty close involvement with the landscape since I was a kid, because my father always lived near the sea. He loved to go fishing and collect shellfish and I used to go with him on those forays. For a while we went to live in Redmond; a little town on the coast west of Hamilton, on a harbour much like Portobello. We were near the entrance to the harbour where you could hear the sea booming on the bar all the time. We lived in a garage on a section for two years. So when I wanted to be by myself the only place to go was outside. At that point I started to feel really close to the hills and got to really love the quiet. I found it conducive to painting, thinking, creating. I work much better out in the country.

I'm not concerned with just recording something though. I take great liberties with the environment, using it to my own ends. I've always been conscious that painting is fundamentally an abstract thing. At Portobello I've done very many paintings of Harbour Cone - it's like an icon in the landscape and seems to take on a sort of spiritual significance.

It's pretty obvious to me, as it is to any thinking person, that something is amiss in the environment, that there is much that's gone wrong in the world at large. It seems an outrage that one kind of people can live in the lap of luxury while a few miles away there are people starving to death. I see what's going on in the environment as part of a world-wide breakdown in society. In every problem that arises you can detect similar motives and discord. I feel that the problem is basically a spiritual one. What is needed is a greater sum of things like caring and loving and lack of prejudice: but first, one must get one's own life in order. You can talk your head off about the world's problems but no one's going to listen if you haven't got it going well under your own roof. For example, the women's movement, to which I'm very sympathetic - what's needed from women is more patience and from men more tolerance. These are spiritual commodities.

I just couldn't imagine spending hours of my life working on images which I disdain and loathe, for the sake of their painting value - I find that a destructive kind of pursuit. I'd much rather concentrate on those things I find uplifting and beautiful. A lot of what I'm saying is the result of my beliefs as a Ba'Hai. The most religious paintings I've seen were in Hawaii, the only country I've been to outside New Zealand. Because the painters were spiritually motivated, the paintings have a deeply religious feeling: simple, not ostentatious in any way, but very very moving and with reverence for the subject. I suppose when I'm contemplating this land, I get the same sense of reverence for this creation and I'm conscious of what I feel to be the Creator's hand. The beauty of it all, the infinite variety, what a miracle it is! These are the things which really move me, and I hope some of that respect for the land comes through in my paintings.

I'd very much like to visit the National Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but my roots are here. I think we've got over the feeling of isolation being a bad thing; in fact I think it's a very good thing in many ways. New Zealand hasn't as many ghosts as, say, a place like Paris where so much has happened before. It's almost saturated, it's had its day. If something new comes out of this world, I think it will happen in those places which so far have remained relatively silent, and where there is room for new things to happen. We have a very recent history and we have no-one saying, 'This is our glorious past; this is what has been done.' We're still pioneering.

Robin White photograph by Marti Friedlander

A number of people are moving out of the city and buying up ten-acre blocks, living 'the simple life'. I don't really respect their motives for doing it. There's something about it that doesn't ring true. I really don't think the answer is for everyone to take off into the country, but I to get together wherever they are, in the city or the suburbs. The cities are important. And to decide that it's impossible to live there is not right. I have no illusions about how much I depend on the city; a city that is functioning properly is a wonderful thing. Our civilisation is at the point now when something has got to happen. Things have got top heavy and out of proportion, the cities are dehumanised. Cities like Florence at the time of her greatness, when there were only 60,000 people, must have been very beautiful places, very rich, very creative. Dunedin still has that feeling of being man-sized, related to the human scale. You can walk from one end of it to the other, encompass it in your mind: it becomes something that you can relate to. It will be good when cities can get back to that scale.