Bright light casts deep shadows

Freeman White pays homage to the landscape of Hawkes Bay in This Land. Photo / Dean Purcell

Tom Scott's new movie Separation City features a German character called Klaus, an artist with a roving eye. We see his studio, we see him painting (and bonking), we see his work. It's all an illusion.

German actor Thomas Kretschmann's CV may be long and distinguished - he's been in dozens of movies and TV shows since the mid-80s, including The Pianist, King Kong and Valkyrie - but the artwork in Separation City is not his. It's by Wellington artist Freeman White, who has an exhibition of landscapes opening in Auckland the very same week as the film starts screening nationwide.

White got the Separation City gig after the film's art director asked Wellington dealer Peter McLeavey to recommend a few artists who might be suitable for the job. As White speaks fluent German and paints landscapes, nudes, still-lifes and portraits, he was the man.

"They filmed part of it in my studio," says the 30-year-old, who won the Adams National Portrait Award in 2006. "They got me to do four paintings specifically for the movie and there's one scene where Klaus is painting this massive pohutukawa which they got me to do. Thomas would say, 'Hey Freeman, what do I do now?' I'm like, 'Hold the brush like this' and he'd say" - White slips into a heavy guttural accent - " 'Goddit, goddit'."

White says the simultaneous opening of the film and the exhibition is "a coincidence but brilliant timing." While the Adam Award saluted his skills as a portrait painter, he has long painted landscapes and the Oedipus Rex show is his homage to Hawkes Bay, the region he grew up in.

The oils range in size from smaller studies of the land at dusk or after a storm to large canvases which capture the last glow of the sun on the hills and a startling piece called This Land in which the light has turned the pastures to a near-surreal green.

"These are actual places," he says. "What I've done, though, is take out quite a few references to people living there, taken out the houses and simplified some of the landscapes to make them more striking.

"They are allegorical paintings, meant on one level to be uplifting and calming to the viewer but they are also a reference to the way the landscape has been denuded. It's the post-colonial view of beauty, where the native bush has been stripped. You can see the effect of humanity on the landscape. When colonists saw the native foliage they saw it as something foreign and ugly. The Hawkes Bay area has been quite dramatically affected by what it has been used for."

White was born in Havelock North to parents who encouraged his artistic talents: his mother is a teacher and painter, while his father is a scientist who, among other things, bred the Pacific Rose apple. As a child he spent time living in Germany and France, then attended Elam School of Fine Arts in 1998 where, he says, not for the first time, he "felt a blatant disregard for painting."

"I'm sure I'm not the only person who felt like that," he says. "I don't want to harp on about it as it was in the past but a lot of people in institutions around the world are proclaiming the death of painting and this and that but you have to be slightly sceptical."

The Elam experience left White feeling "a little bit disillusioned" and he abandoned studies for a couple of years - but kept on painting. In 2001, he won a scholarship to study at the Learning Connexion in Wellington, a place he describes as having "a holistic, positive vision."

In 2006, Scottish National Portraiture Gallery director James Holloway judged White's Portrait of Hans the Adam Award winner, and offered the young artist a residency in Edinburgh. To earn "pocket money" for the trip, White made 35 portraits for $100 a head ("a once-in-a-lifetime thing," he says, laughing) and ended up spending six months under the wings of Holloway, who organised some high-profile commissions for him, including a study of the Royal Architect and his wife.

The other great benefit of the Edinburgh experience, he says, was the chance to go behind the scenes at Scotland's national galleries and visit their restoration workshops. "I have held in my hands over 100 Rembrandt etchings, da Vinci drawings, Goya, and I have run my fingers over a painting by J. M. W. Turner. I walked into a workshop and they had these two Turner oil paintings on an easel. The restorer said, 'We haven't cleaned it yet, why don't you touch it?' Moments like that are priceless."

In 2007, White was artist-in-residence at the Staffelter Hof in the Moselle Valley in Germany, a place he is heading back to later this year via a residency at Key West in Florida. He has been working on the paintings for the This Land show for about six months, using photos as a base.

"But they are paintings, not perfect reproductions of a photo. The term 'realism' has been applied to my work quite a lot - I'll accept that but I see them as paintings with recognisable elements which allow people to relate to them. The mood and energy you put into them are important. I was consciously aware of the time of day when I have gathered the images - there was quite a lot of trial and error, the light is changing very quickly as you take the photos."

While White's time at Elam had its ups and downs, one of his tutors, artist Ronnie van Hout, told him something which has stuck. "He said, 'Everyone talks about the harsh clarity of New Zealand light. Don't they know the brightest light casts the darkest shadows?' That's an interesting comment."

You could even call it a "goddit" moment.