Simon Vine is exhibiting works that he had stored in his mother's Whanganui garage in Whanganui. Photo / Lewis Gardner
Simon Vine is exhibiting works that he had stored in his mother's Whanganui garage in Whanganui. Photo / Lewis Gardner
Fine art painter Simon Vine is sharing some of his works at a Whanganui gallery after pulling them out of storage in his mother's garage.
Vine was born and raised in Whanganui, leaving in 1991 to go to university.
He is back in town to visit his mother over theChristmas/New Year period, and the works he had stored in her garage are now on display at the Wanganui Arts Society gallery in Trafalgar Pl.
"I dropped the works off about three years ago and then went off overseas," Vine said.
"I came back to visit Mum for Christmas, and I thought if the Arts Society building was empty it would be a good excuse to spend a few more days with her and get some exercise.
"I'll take this [exhibition] down on January 11 and then I'll bike to Auckland to get some more exercise."
Vine studied English literature and philosophy and obtained a bachelor of arts in 1997. He went on to complete a master of fine arts at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in 2009.
His "Retrospective" exhibition at Wanganui Arts Society features paintings from 2006 to 2017, some of which are minimal white portraits that were made during his masters project.
"It's always been a study in representing the human form and figure. They're not specific portraits of individuals, although I'm interested in the idea of portraiture.
"I'm not really about veristic, realistic representations of individuals. The process was to work as quickly as possible, be happy with it as a functioning Gestalt or representation, then put it down and start another one in order to improve the technique.
"I did that for a few years, and went nuts."
Vine said the masters works in the exhibition were "about getting to the simplest, functioning representation" that he could find.
"In terms of the overall ideology [of the exhibition], there really isn't one. There's touches of mythology, and some of the works have a slightly symbolistic bent.
"For the most part it's about not burdening things with layers of ideology and meaning.
"I used to go on the internet and look for black and white photography and just collect. I had files of thousands of these images and would go through them and say 'that one, that one, that one'.
The works on display were painted between 2006 and 2017. Photo / Lewis Gardner
"There's one I called 'The Russian Actor', because it was an old movie still from a Russian film from black and white days. There's another from a clay sculpture of an African woman, and the one on the end is a Julius Caesar bust."
In his masters, he spent time talking about how representation had evolved during the Roman period, Vine said.
"It became a propaganda tool for certain emperors, and their representation was in the centre of every Roman town throughout the whole empire. It used to be coins, and then it became marble.
"Their practice of taking death masks of patriarchs and hanging them on the hall wall really influenced people's expectations on sculpture and changed the way the Romans did figurative sculpture.
"I kind of alluded to that having an effect on our psyche of photographs. I was talking about that 10 years ago and look at it now, so much figurative representation is photo-realistic. People think it's the bee's knees.
"That is technique that's just beyond me, it takes far too many hours."
For the past two years Vine has been teaching English as a foreign language in Prague, Czech Republic.
"Having a New Zealand passport is the reason I'm back here, otherwise I'd be shut up in a room in the Czech Republic getting more and more into debt.
"There was a big surge [of Covid-19] there just after I left and they're in complete lockdown again.
"Everything seems so normal here, but there's a sense of things being a little bit quieter in New Zealand at the moment. That isolation has kicked up a notch.
"Who knows what will happen next?"
Simon Vine's "Retrospective" exhibition will be on display at the Whanganui Arts Society in Trafalgar Pl until January 11.
