A life of creativity in Barry Ball retrospective

Barry Ball Art

Barry Ball’s exhibition opening this weekend at Tairāwhiti Museum is a retrospective encounter and celebration of decades of persistent and relentless pursuit of a life of creativity by a dedicated and true artist.

It is with a curious sense for colour that we are immediately drawn to the work of Gisborne resident Barry Ball — a full-time practising artist for more than 60 years.

Ball began his career in ceramics and extended his art into painting and sculpture.

The exhibition, called Moving Hands,  will feature a combination of works that were recently completed such as sculpture and also reworked paintings, some earlier, others recent. All pots are from previous decades as Ball has since moved to painting and sculpture.

Born in Feilding, he went to school in South Africa when his family moved there, and further trained as a potter at Briglin and Chelsea Potteries in the United Kingdom.

After many years abroad Ball returned to New Zealand where he quickly gained status  in ceramics in New Zealand. His pots twice won merit awards at the prestigious Fletcher Challenge Awards. At the time it was a great accolade to have work accepted into this prestigious competition.

In the early 1990s, after 28 years,  Ball took his powerful sense of colour layering using various techniques and spontaneous abstraction to the world of fine art painting.

He was able to quickly translate colour to the canvas, discern and perceive composition, and his works found themselves in many private collections in Aotearoa.

Barry Ball’s artworks are intuitive and sensitive. He shares the philosophy of Vasily Kandinsky, 1866–1944, who believed that “art should not be merely representational but should strive to express spirituality and the depth of human emotion through abstraction”.

Ball says the paintings are personal and intuitive. They are pre-planned only in the broadest sense.

He sometimes arrives effortlessly and other times it’s a struggle to reach a conclusion for his own completed work.

It is there the viewer’s introduction begins as they tap into the feeling and begin a rewarding emotional journey.

Ball has exhibited in Austria, Italy and Spain and last had an exhibition in Gisborne in 2001. He is the brother of well-known Gisborne cartoonist Murray Ball.

WHAT: Moving Hands

WHEN: February 3 - April 21

OPENING:  Friday February 2, 5.30pm.

WHERE: Tairawhiti Museum, Kelvin Rise, 10 Stout St.