As tempting as it is to write about recent events - the floods, local elections or Simon Bridges' calamitous interview on Campbell Live last week - I will refrain and talk instead about something seemingly off-topic: art.
In Wellington recently, I visited the exhibition Colour & Light: Impressionism from France & America. Currently showing at Te Papa, it features lesser known works from some Impressionists, including Monet, Cezanne and Renoir.
Having been away two months, the landscapes, light and portrayal of the natural world resonated in a way that brought about an unexpected wave of nostalgia for Whanganui. Perhaps this was an inevitable reaction to being in the concrete-and-glass capital too long, combined with a romanticised memory of this town and its introduced aesthetic of poplar trees and colonial-era buildings ... But more so, it was the play of light on the water and hills that caught me, the subtle rendering of farmland, headlands and lush gardens under broad, tempestuous skies, and, in the distances, little boats adrift in the elements.
Reading the blurb of a Monet painting, describing the artist's desire to retreat from city-life up the Seine to paint, seemed a familiar sensibility in many who come to settle in this town and surrounds.
Accompanying this thought was the remembrance that artists and environmentalists have, in the past, been closely aligned - if not one and the same. Consider William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement. A preservationist and a prominent socialist, Morris' shunning of industrialisation and return to natural motifs was not simply aesthetic, but symbolically defiant as well.
