‘Light the Way’, acrylic and silver leaf on aluminium panel, 1806mm x 1806mm

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There is an inner sense of wellbeing that comes from spending time among trees and plants – a measurable physical reaction to these environments. Maybe it’s the cool oxygenated air, light filtering in through the forest canopy, or perhaps the simplicity of walking that quiets the mind. Whatever it is, I feel a connection to the forests of Aotearoa and I enjoy sharing this connection with viewers of my work. 

This exhibition is a continuation of work exploring my relationship with the montane forests of Aotearoa, in particular Auckland’s west coast. It’s a place I have felt drawn to since first moving here in my 20s, spending time at Piha and more recently reconnecting through an artist residency in Karekare. It’s about the experience of being in those places, spending time thinking about my relationship with them. 

Early in my artistic process, I gather reference to work from. I often start with photography and sketching plein air. I love the language of photography –  depth of field, light flares, motion blurring, colour saturation and contrast are all aspects of photography I bring to my painting. Sketching feeds into the work through the looseness of quick expressive mark-making. My paintings are about a push and pull relationship between these approaches, building bridges between visual languages. 

In the studio the work becomes more focused on the painting process, considering painterly aspects, like the relationships of objective surface and illusionary space, flat areas of colour and textural brush marks, compositional structure and smaller individual forms. I like to emphasise contrasting elements, I think they enhance each other. Much like putting colours together from opposite sides of the colour wheel, they become more striking together than they would be individually. These stages are a kind of editing process, where the works are shaped and refined, building from the experience of walking in the forest to a finished painting.

I have been moving towards creating work that reflects the complexity of those forest environments. In the past, I’ve been inclined toward simplification, often picking out details that interest me formally and working through an almost abstract interpretation. 

I’ve explored botanical forms in many ways over the years – more recently I’ve started to look at just how complicated, interwoven and dense these bush-scapes really are.

Taking a step backwards to see a wider frame has changed the aesthetics. Dealing with multiple smaller forms is an interesting visual challenge. Composing images with different visual scales, I’m using the same compositional backbones to connect these paintings with each other, and also with earlier works.

This show is about connecting past and present ideas in order to keep moving forward, and connecting us all to a positive and protective relationship with the green spaces of Aotearoa.

Neal Palmer 2024

View Connections online here.

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Reflections on my residency at Auckland Botanic Gardens, Summer 2023

My time as Artist in Residence at the Auckland Botanic Gardens started in December 2022, with a retrospective exhibition, a selection of works from the last 20 years. The most recent  works were from my 2022 exhibition at Föenander Gallery. The exhibition represented various directions I’ve taken over the years including frottage pieces and silver leaf images.

Alongside the retrospective, I set up an open studio in the gallery space available to me, and started work on the project I’d proposed to the Gardens for my residency. My intention was to be as open about the process of creating art as possible, and the open studio provided a rare chance for visitors to see an artist at work.

The Garden’s theme for Summer 2022-23 was ‘Taking A Closer Look…’ which aligned well with my own ideas for the residency.  The proposal was to build a ‘portrait’ of details of the Gardens and more specifically a portrait of a path that I had chosen through the Gardens.

My journey began in the Pa Harakeke area, through the Native Trees section to the Huakaiwaka Visitors Centre, then onto the Conifers, the Cactus Rock Garden, Potter Children’s Garden, the Roses and then the Palms.

The process involved walking and soaking up the visual feast of the Gardens, taking photographs of the forms and patterns that gave a sense of place specific to each area.

I tend to take a lot of photographs and over the duration of my residency I took around 2500. 

I reviewed the images and selected those that jumped out as potentially useful in the project, then printed them out and manually cropped images further to distil the forms, colour and patterns so that they became representative but not necessarily obvious.

I had decided to create a series of works on A2 paper that would hang together in a grid following the geographical line of my journey. 

I wanted to use the time here to explore materials and techniques I hadn’t used in recent years, and to get back into drawing, to get ‘loose’ with my techniques and see what effect that would have on my work.  

I rediscovered how much I love charcoal drawing, something I hadn’t done since my years at art school. I mixed techniques and materials together to see how they worked in a single panel and experimented with hanging the works in different orders to explore how they related and reacted to each other.

I arranged the paper works gradually, as each was finished, adding them from right to left along a large wall in the Visitors Centre foyer, an area slightly separated from my workspace.  As I was working I would invite the people who stopped to chat with me to take a look at the project as it progressed, and let me know their thoughts.

The work inspired many and varied conversations about art and botany, I liked it when people recognised the details from plants they’d seen in the gardens and how they would often say it made them see the plants in a different way. For example my rose works, “why did you paint just the stems?” was a common question usually followed by how interesting and varied they realised the thorns actually are. These visitors come from Aotearoa and all over the world. They represent a diverse cross-section of society and my interaction with the visitors was one of the most enjoyable and important elements of my time there.

I felt equally positive about my interactions with the Gardens staff, who were encouraging and supportive of my residency. Working alongside the large team there was a stark difference to working alone in my art studio at home. I was energised by their enthusiasm.

The resulting work, a combination of 60 individual A2 pieces, was a direct reaction to the Gardens. It is a reflection of the Gardens own diversity, an eclectic selection of botanical specimens gathered into various curated areas. The work contains a greater variety of images than I have grouped together before, varied and interesting in their combinations. 

My time at the Gardens opened up new avenues of exploration for me which is what I had hoped the residency would do.

I will continue to visit, to gather reference and inspiration from the Gardens, and would highly recommend the residency to any artists working in the field of botanical art.

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This summer, artist Neal Palmer will be exhibiting work in the Huakaiwaka Visitor Centre and interacting with visitors to the Gardens in his role as Friends of the Gardens Visiting Artist 2023.

Find out more

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When our borders re-opened in 2022, I took the opportunity to travel to Europe and the UK to reconnect with family and friends and to visit as many galleries and exhibitions as I could get to. Big shows in big galleries. Scale was the thing that really jumped out. It changes the way one views work, evoking a visceral, emotional response.

I came home to NZ, inspired to go big. I’ve worked at scale before and had been planning a large works exhibition for some time. The time had come.

‘Under the Surface’ brings together themes and processes I’ve been developing and playing with for 20+ years. I started this body of work as a way of visually acclimatising to a new country.

Having moved from London to Aotearoa and being naturally inclined to the great outdoors I started drawing and taking photographs of the fascinating forms of native plants like Nikau and Harakeke. The resultant paintings were very much about the underlying form of those plants, the way the shapes repeat through scale and relate to each other and how I can represent the essence of those subjects in a way that also relates to painting more widely.

Over the years I’ve developed personal stories around the subjects I’ve studied. The titles reflect the stories I tell myself.   ‘Crossing Paths’ references the many possibilities we are faced with, different directions taken, the leaves on their trajectories representing interactions, connections, the intertwining of people’s lives.

I have been taking pictures of magnolias for many years and one of my favourites is in London at Saint Patrick’s church near the Royal Academy of Art. They’ve followed me here on an emotional level, representing the idea of successful migration, my own and more generally a symbol of diverse communities putting down roots.  It’s a positive spin on relocation in a modern context, not to be confused with the injustices of the colonial era and the complications involved with that.

I aim to produce work that relates to nature in a positive and enlightening manner, to generate protective feelings towards increasingly stressed ecological environs.

Which brings me to my Kauri work, mega scale personified. A giant born of the gods and a precious piece of the puzzle that is Aotearoa’s complex ecology under stress. With very few of these giant trees left after most of the forests were felled, the remaining Kauri are now threatened by Kauri Dieback Disease which has spread widely and kills quickly.

Dieback spreads through the soil infecting trees via their roots. There’s a lot going on under the surface that we need to understand before it’s too late.

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Contact Föenander Galleries for more information.

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What is this big beautiful painting? (featured in above image)
Tane Moana (Te Araroa) is a 4 panel piece, a tad shy of 2m sq.  It’s an image of the largest Kauri on Northland’s east coast. The tree’s name is Tane Moana and it’s on the Te Araroa track near Tutukaka. There is a boardwalk right up to the bottom of the trunk which gives you a great sense of the volume and scale of this significant totem.

What is the largest painting you have made?
I’ve painted several sizable works over the last 20 years, a couple of flax leaf pieces approaching 4m wide and over a meter high. I often use multiple panels to achieve large scale as in this harakeke work pictured with the then Prime Minister (Helen Clark) at an event in 2006. My latest four panel work is of Tane Moana, the largest Kauri on Northland’s east coast. I have a horse fetish and have painted one I particularly liked, slightly larger than life, also in 4 panels. I worked as a mural painter and commercial gilder in the 90s so have worked on a much larger scale, though these are separate from my contemporary body of work.

Read more

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My title ‘On Track’ is at the same time a statement, a description and a question.

As a description the paintings in ‘On Track’ are a development from work I started during an art residency at Karekare House in 2018, for which my proposal was to explore and visually respond to walking and running the Hilary trail. 

As a question ‘On Track?’ (for my purposes here) refers to environmental issues; are we on track to mitigate the harshest consequences of climate change? Can we arrest the loss of bio-diversity? Stop polluting the world?  What track are we on? 

Walking and running in the Waitakere Ranges and west coast beaches is one of the great pleasures of living in Auckland, and something I have enjoyed for many years. It was a direct response to this environment while living at Piha (1996-7) that sparked a body of work which has now spanned over 20 years. As I mentioned above, in 2018 I was lucky enough to be the inaugural Karekare House artist in residence, I wanted to develop a project that I had been thinking about for a few years after walking the Hilary Trail with my 15yo son. A kind of portrait in pattern and form, to walk/run the trail picking out details to build an aesthetic impression of the journey. But this was March 2018 and we were all becoming aware of Kauri dieback disease, and the majority of the Hilary Trail was closed not long before I started the residency. Thankfully, the section between Piha and Pararaha Valley was open during my time at Karekare, so I was able to do some work on my project. 

As with most residencies (it seems to me anyway) the realities of being there changed the direction of the work somewhat. For a start I couldn’t ignore the effect Kauri dieback was having on the Waitakere Ranges and other regions. Kauri dieback is a microbial spore that travels through soil and eventually kills Kauri trees, there are quite a few affected trees in Karekare. It is a heart-breaking thought that without help to stop it’s spread, Dieback could well wipe out the magnificent Kauri. Though, as with many issues currently, another microbial problem has taken the spot light for the last couple of years. This of course is no reason to take our eye off the ball, we need to deal with all the problems facing us. You can find out more through groups like The Kauri Project and McCahon House. During my residency I was super excited to be invited to stay at McCahon House so that I could work on a group of frottage pieces from the Kauri in Colin McCahon’s garden. I started these frottage pieces as a way of collecting reference material but soon realised they had great potential as works in their own right. 

Despite the fact you can’t walk the Hilary trail presently, I’m still interested in the idea of painting portraits of journeys. In fact, I’m thinking bigger. The Hilary trail used to be part of the Te Araroa track, the trail that runs from Cape Reinga to Bluff. I’ve walked/run various sections so far, including the section near Tutukaka where Tane Moana stands, the largest Kauri on Northland’s east coast. 

Tane Moana brings me back to the works in this exhibition, he is the destination. On Track through northern bush trails, following orange triangles to stay the course. Picking up the patterns and forms as we travel, walking, running, thinking, taking pictures and making impressions. It’s about gathering the interesting stuff (to me) so as to create work that gives the feeling of places I have travelled.

Neal Palmer (2021)

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