Painter in the wild airs his passions in letters

Toss Woollaston in Wellington, 1991. Picture / Te Papa

Jill Trevelyan was working in a public art gallery in Timaru when she first looked seriously at the work of painter Toss Woollaston.

"Before then his work had puzzled me, but when this touring show of drawings and watercolours came through, I was able to look at them every day," says Trevelyan, whose collection of Woollaston's letters has just been published by Te Papa Press.

"Toss is the kind of painter that the longer you look at the work, the more you see in it. There was a pen and ink drawing of his wife Edith lying back in a chair which was so beautiful, it imprinted itself on me.

"There is the audacity of the work, that this brushstroke, this splash of colour could stand in for an ear, an eye, a hand. A lot of the work hovers between abstraction and representation."

Soon after this encounter, Trevelyan moved to Wellington to become a curatorial intern at the National Art Gallery, then run by Luit Beiringa.

Beiringa staged the first major retrospective of the Nelson-based painter's work at the Manawatu Art Gallery in 1973, and had scheduled another at the National Gallery in 1991.

Working on the team preparing that show, Trevelyan became aware of the huge volume of correspondence produced by Woollaston.

"The head curator, Gerald Barnett, went to Nelson and came back with boxes of papers, including all these letters," she says. "It was right back to his letters home to his mother in Taranaki when he was 17, after he first left home. I was fascinated by the personality of this ambitious young man, they were very telling.

"After Toss died in 1998, I heard a lot more archival material had been deposited at Te Papa. I went over and saw there was so much there."

Woollaston was from a generation that communicated by letter. Toll calls were for emergencies, or if someone died.

The trove included letters the artist sent Edith, usually once or twice a day, during his frequent travels.

"Edith kept the letters which came into the house, so that gave me an idea who the key correspondents were. I contacted as many people as I could, following every lead," Trevelyan says.

Many correspondents had kept the letters Woollaston sent them. Others by the likes of Landfall founder Charles Brasch were already in national archives.

During a three-year research fellowship at Te Papa, Trevelyan winnowed down 2700 letters to select the 419 for the book.

"Toss was writing a lot about his own art and development as an artist. I was interested in that, the way you could get a real insight into one person's creative life over 70 years of work, during this period when the art world changed dramatically."

The letters show how the small New Zealand arts community was intertwined. Many of Woollaston's early friends and supporters were painters, poets, writers, actors and similar. The book is not just a way to learn about Woollaston but about the development of the arts.

Woollaston felt part of his job was to educate and advocate. He wrote reviews of other painters' exhibitions, including early shows by Colin McCahon, Tony Fomison and Gordon Walters. He also wrote letters to newspapers defending artists such as McCahon or Walters, or just to draw attention to what he considered particularly good work on display at the Nelson gallery.

Creating challenging, modernist work when the public seemed to prefer the chocolate box landscapes encouraged by the country's richest art prize, the Kelliher Awards, put him on the margins, but he was determined to fight.

"Saw the Kelleher thing last night - it is unbelievably barbaric (a whole turkey on the supper table) - just a monstrous set-up where the ruling philistines, for £2500, get the artists to paint that their taste is right," Woollaston wrote to Edith in 1958.

In 1961, he told friend Pat Harris, "You do not meet the public half way, you have to go all the way".

Many of the letters were to dealer Peter McLeavey, whose first show at his Cuba St, Wellington, gallery in 1968 was by Woollaston. McLeavey is also discussed at length in letters to others, particularly his pushing the artist to paint on a larger scale.

McLeavey says he was just "one of numerous correspondents", and if he had any influence on the work, it was because "I encourage all my artists to push their gift and experiment".

He first saw Woollaston's work in Landfall magazine while living in London, and searched it out on his return in 1961.

"What I liked about his work, even before becoming an art dealer, was he seemed to be one of us. It was strong and gutsy and didn't mess round. It was powerfully formed landscape," McLeavey says. He says interest in Woollaston's work eased slightly after his death, but that is changing. The Peter McLeavey Gallery continues to hold shows of works from the estate, and works continue to sell.

"His position is important in New Zealand art. He will be increasingly appreciated as a role model to artists, as someone who had a vision and worked at it consistently with total dedication over a long period of time, and during that time produced high quality painting of the New Zealand landscape.

"He was one of the people who invented my New Zealand as seen through the landscape, as did McCahon."

McLeavey said Woollaston will also be remembered as a fine writer. "In his various texts and letters there are wonderful things on what it is to be an artist here, how one can live life here and develop one's gifts here.

"He was also very committed to the development of a New Zealand dealing system, which was of great help to me," McLeavey says.

Indeed, the book includes a 1989 letter to Woollaston's then MP, Ken Shirley, opposing the creation of the Ministry of Culture.

"Culture, I believe, does better wild than cultivated ...

"A few tough, devoted and enlightened dealers will do more for the best artists in the country than a whole government ministry, and with far less cost to the country."

* Toss Woollaston: A Life In Letters, edited by Jill Trevelyan. Te Papa Press, $59.99