Landscape Values

In 1936, artist Rita Angus travelled from Christchurch to Cass with two fellow artists, Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell, for ten days' painting and sketching in the mountains. Presumably they took the train, disembarking at the tiny rural station which Angus was to turn into a national icon with her painting Cass, now in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. (I photographed the station in 2009; it is little changed from Angus's view.)

Rita Angus, Cass, 1936, collection of Christchurch Art Gallery, via Te Ara.

In 2007 Angus's Cass was voted New Zealand's favourite painting in a television poll. It was in the news again a couple of weeks ago, when the painting was cited as one of the factors in a decision to decline an application to intensively irrigate the surrounding landscape for dairying. The iconic work of art had served in turn to make the landscape it depicted itself iconic. The view which Angus had captured in the high country seven decades ago could not now be altered.

Angus, Henderson and Scarvell stayed at the Mountain Biological Station at Cass, a field hut owned by Canterbury College (later the University of Canterbury). An ecologist who helped to establish the station, Leonard Cockayne, viewed the area as a "natural laboratory"; generations of biology, forestry, engineering, zoology, botany, and agriculture students have carried out field work at Cass. Although a bathroom, a stove, and pipes for hot water were added to the hut in the early 1930s, accommodation at the field station was still fairly primitive in 1936. Electricity, courtesy of the Railways Department, was not supplied to the hut until the following year. Angus and her friends would have lit kerosene lamps as the evenings drew in.

A page from the Visitors' Book at Cass Hut from 1936, showing the names of the three artists.
Via Christchurch Art Gallery

Angus painted the field station from the back, in a view which took in the browned-off grasslands of the river basin and looked towards the mountains folded in purple shadows, while the steam train passed through on its way up to Arthur's Pass. The stylised curlicues of smoke from the train curl protectively over the hut; they terminate in a series of flattened half-moons which echo the lines of sunlight on the ridges of the hills in the middle distance. The landscape is dry, harsh, uncompromising. In the foreground, angular waves of grey and brown tussock appear to break against the back wall of the hut.

Rita Cook (Angus), Cass Field Station, 1936, University of Canterbury Art Collection

Between them, Angus and Henderson produced ten or twelve paintings from the trip; little is known about Julia Scarvell's companion works. Henderson exhibited her Cass paintings at The Group show at the Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery later in 1936. (The Christchurch Art Gallery wants to locate Henderson's view of the railway station, and exhibit it alongside Angus's work: Henderson also painted her own view of the 'Canterbury College Hut'. [PDF])

Over intervening years, Angus's Cass has become not only a much-loved and frequently reproduced painting, but an emblem of a certain kind of historical New Zealandness: rural, unpretentious, lonely.

Louise Henderson, Plains and Hills, 1936, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

Back to 2013, and the new economic imperative to irrigate New Zealand's rural hinterland for dairying, which threatens to alter the distinctive character of our national landscapes. In making his decision not to allow irrigation at Cass, the Environment Commissioner, Robert Nixon, noted that the proposal would not serve to change the actual landscape painted by Rita Angus. But he agreed that the painting had "powerful symbolism", and that the proposed land-use associated with irrigation could have a significant adverse visual impact on views from State Highway 73, around the area of the painting. Nixon cited the high landscape values of the area -- variously shared, historic and recognised "significant natural science, aesthetic, and Tangata Whenua landscape values" -- and declined the application to industrialise the landscape.

Art history 1: industrial irrigators 0, you might think. A rare decision. But it might equally be recognised that there is something of an irony to this. One of Angus's purposes in painting the burned-off vistas at Cass was, like many of the more progressive artists of her generation, to depict the effects of modernity and economic progress on the landscape. Speed, transportation, telecommunications, industry: all are present in Angus's modernist depiction of Cass. Her inclusion of telegraph poles and railway tracks reveals a landscape in the process of being altered -- made modern -- by its inhabitants.

A generation or two previously, European settler artists were not yet at home in the landscape; their depictions of it were either topographical (sending information about the new land 'home' to Britain) or were concerned with the sublimity of the wildly unfamiliar landforms. Petrus van der Velden for example, travelling by stagecoach a few miles further into the mountains at Otira in the 1890s, painted torrents of rushing water in stormy, wild, rain-tossed surroundings: nature at its most elemental. (I think it was artist Ann Shelton, while researching her Once More With Feeling series which retraced works by van der Velden at Otira, who discovered that his vantage point for many of the works was actually under a bridge, snugly in the dry. But then I'd imagine it's almost impossible to paint in a storm.)

For Pakeha New Zealand artists of Angus's generation, Britain and Europe were no longer home. There had been six generations of Angus's own family resident in New Zealand by mid-century. Home was New Zealand; and images like Cass were a way of making oneself at home in the changing landscape. "It expresses joy in living here,' said Angus of the painting.

In citing Angus's painting as a factor in the decision not to allow industrial-scale irrigation in the Cass landscape, there is clearly a gentle irony in a work of art concerned with the effects of modernity stalling contemporary economic "progress". It is as if the restless sea of tussock, the light along the ridges of the mountains, even the train steaming through the landscape, are to be frozen in time, captured by Angus's brush in 1936 and remaining unchanged into the future. Angus's view of the landscape is the view which will prevail. There is a cost to this. As economist Eric Crampton tweeted:

There were more factors taken into consideration, of course, beyond the painting, which led to the decision not to irrigate the environs of Cass. But I think the presence of Angus's painting in the deliberations makes the decision remarkable. (I'm unaware of a precedent.) Rita Angus's personal expression of "joy in living here" has come to stand for a common pleasure: it has become one of the emblems of contemporary New Zealand identity. Eighty years ago, Angus saw and communicated the cultural value of the Canterbury high-country landscape; the price put on her vision in 2013 is considered, with this decision, to exceed the potential economic returns of the landscape itself.

Hiding in plain sight

Sometime around the middle of the 1960s, artist Bill Sutton used to fly regularly between Christchurch and Wellington. He'd been appointed to various national art committees; this was the moment when New Zealand high cultural infrastructure for the visual arts was starting to be built. On his way to and from the meetings, he'd look out of the window of the plane, the ochres and umbers and deep shadowy violet-greens of the Canterbury plains framed by the curve of the cabin. "When you look down from a plane there is no right way up," he commented. "it becomes pure pattern. I saw bands of clouds below the horizon, and sometimes no horizon at all. This medley evolved into many paintings and one major series." [1]

W.A. Sutton, Plantation Series II, 1986, oil on canvas, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

As a lecturer, Sutton was prone to tipping up works, holding them upside down so that the composition could be considered from another angle, so that subject matter would not get in the way of looking. The painting was always to be considered as a composition before it was considered as a window on to the world beyond the work. But when Sutton felt that he was skirting too close to abstraction, he pulled back. He was concerned that abstraction would become an end in its own right, a form of decoration. He worried that art-about-art, rather than art-about-experience, was essentially an arid pursuit, as dry and as unsustainable as the burned-off grasslands which became his characteristic motif.

W.A. Sutton, Murals, Waikari, 1951, oil on canvas, Christchurch Art Gallery

At much the same time as he was flying to Wellington and back on the business of art, Sutton had moved into his house near the river in Richmond, Christchurch, designed for him by his friend and colleague, the modernist sculptor Tom Taylor. The scale of Sutton's work changed. Painting in a big room -- a combined studio/living space, with a bank of high windows on one wall, and a view out to the garden through the other -- meant that he could construct larger canvasses, and work on more of them at once. The Grasses series, and later the huge Plantation works, with their aerial views of the Canterbury plains, and the Land Synthesis series with their sense of the landscape viewed at great speed, were painted in this studio.

W.A. Sutton, Landscape Synthesis, oil on canvas, 1980

I fly to and from Wellington on the business of art sometimes myself; I can never look out of the window of the plane at the patchwork of fields below without thinking of Sutton's Plantation series; and without thinking of Sutton himself, his face pressed against the glass of the small thick windows of the old turbo-prop planes, scanning the horizon for significant forms. In his notebook perhaps a sketch for a drift of cloud, a curve of hill, the remains of a vapour trail against an impossibly blue sky, a grid of lines describing the bleak hard fastnesses of the Canterbury landscape. Seeing the world as a work yet to be painted.

W.A. Sutton, Threshold IV, 1973, oil on canvas, Collection Christchurch Art Gallery

When Sutton flew over the plains, and incorporated their characteristic forms into his work, he drew, perhaps, on his experiences during World War II as a member of the Camouflage Unit. Between 1941 and 1944 he had moved around the South Island digging post holes and designing and painting camouflage to hide gun emplacements and ammunition stores. The job was "to make things look like other things". These utilitarian paintings, designed to be seen from the sky, to hide things in plain sight, were often gigantic in scale.

"I remember we disguised an airfield at Taieri, Dunedin, by extending the appearance of paddocks and hedgerows into the airfield itself  ... with bleaches for grass and manure to intensify the colour ... it was so good, our chaps couldn't find it," Sutton commented, forty years later.[2] 

Sutton's familiar view of the Canterbury landscape will change with the introduction of water consents for intensive dairying across the plains; his burned-off dry grasses, shaded by the long dark shadows of the macrocarpa shelter belts, will be replaced by patches of bright jade green. Sutton's aerial landscapes, the structures of ochre and umber and indigo which hover between abstraction and representation, and which for so many people are synonymous with the experience of flying in to the city over the plains, will be relegated to a historical report on experience. Like the paintings which depict it, the landscape is itself a cultural artefact, vulnerable to the forces of market productivity. Although it's part of our cultural identity, the look of our home landscape is as little owned by us as the architectural heritage of our cities.


1. Bill Sutton, 'Personal Perspectives', in Pat Unger, W.A. Sutton: Painter, Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1994, p.46.
2. Bill Sutton, interview with Deborah Shepard, 1982, quoted in Pat Unger, Bill's Story: A Portrait of W.A. Sutton, Canterbury University Press, 2008, p.52.

A packet of cigs at Exeter Railway Station

Exeter Central Railway station, Devon, England. 31/07/1969. Wikimedia Commons, via Rosser1954.

As the story goes, the publisher Allen Lane, returning to London from the West Country following a visit to crime writer Agatha Christie in the early 1930s, was trapped at Exeter railway station waiting for a train with nothing to read. He could buy cigarettes from a vending machine and flick through a newspaper; but otherwise he was on his own. Pacing about the platform and smoking, he conceived of a new range of cheap paperback books which would combine the mass market appeal of American pulp fiction with the modernist design of contemporary German imprints. (After his death, his family described him as part way between missionary and mercenary.) Lane's Penguin paperbacks would make literary fiction available to a wide reading public and would be sold initially from vending machines: the first 'Penguincubator' opened in Charing Cross Road the following year. The paperbacks cost no more than the price of a packet of cigarettes.

Andre Maurois's Ariel, the first Penguin book ever published, and something I have spent most of my life unsuccessfully keeping an eye out for in second-hand bookshops in the hope of making my fortune. (The image above, from Penguin.com, isn't a first edition: the first edition has no accent on the final 'e' of Andre.)

I've always liked this story, not only because I've been a voracious reader and purchaser of Penguin and Puffin paperbacks over the years, but because in my early childhood I too spent quite a lot of time on the platform at Exeter Railway Station, waiting for the train to London and worrying about reading matter. When packing for holidays at my grandparents' house, I would carefully calculate exactly how many books I would need to last both the journey and the visit. Joan Aiken's complete Midnight chronicles. Almost certainly a Molesworth. A couple of Jennings and Darbishires. Second hand copies of Malcolm Saville and Rumer Godden and Alan Garner, picked up from the market. And then I'd pop a couple more in my bag, just in case. Running out of books while away from home would be a disaster. One of the lowest depths of misery, I've always thought, is not having something to read.

On a recent trip away I realised that I hadn't packed a book. Knowing that without something to read I would be pacing around my hotel room like Allen Lane on the station platform, I bought Martin Edmond's extraordinary work of psychogeography, Dark Night, an account of Colin McCahon's lost hours in Sydney in 1984, and The Hill of Wool, Jenny Bornholdt's latest collection of poetry. Both are paperbacks; both include paintings by New Zealand artists on the cover; both writers, seemingly effortlessly, conjure up imaginative worlds with which I am familiar but which are at the same time beautifully, sometimes almost unbearably, strange. (I imagine that I'll carry round forever lines like Edmond's "the way the places we belong to do not belong to us", and Bornholdt's blood-streaked poem "Tower of London".) Both are books I'm pleased to own, and that I know I'll read again and again, but I did notice that each cost considerably more than a packet of cigarettes.

I'm not familiar with the current mechanics of paperback book pricing in New Zealand, but I do think there's something a bit strange when you can order obscure titles to be sent from England at a cheaper cost than you can buy paperbacks in New Zealand. Books are increasingly becoming a luxury item. (My recent purchases cost me respectively three times, and twice, the price of a packet of cigarettes.) I suppose if Allen Lane were still around, he'd be embracing digital formats as literature's new international mass-market vending machine. And the digital future of books, as VUP publisher Fergus Barrowman mentioned recently on Twitter, is likely to lie not with e-books but with "fluid text on multipurpose devices". The death of the novel, of course, has been darkly (and inaccurately) prophesied for decades now, but it may well be that the ubiquity and comparative cheapness of digital technologies will spell the gradual demise as the book-as-object.

I suspect that the distinction between mass publishing and literary publishing may well become increasingly sharp, returning to a time before Lane effectively brought the two together by starting the Penguin imprint. On the one hand, foil-jacketed bodice rippers and thrillers are being sold in mass outlets like supermarkets and big box variety stores, and on the other, literary books are being sold from arm chairs in small quiet rooms or by mail order. It might be wishful thinking, but I hope there will always be room for the cheaply-produced, stylishly-designed paperback book that Lane conceived in my home town: high-end literature in a mass-market format that's perfect for reading in the bath or at the beach or in frustrated moments at train stations when your battery has run down.

Supply and demand

The small guy's class has been doing an economics unit at school, as a consequence of which his teacher has allowed trading with a special classroom currency, in order to teach the kids supply and demand, saving and spending, theories of pricing, and so on. The small guy was regrettably loathe to trade any of the thousands of small pieces of plastic nonsense that litter carpets all over our house. Instead he has drawn a series of pictures which he will offer for sale. A characteristic example of his art-for-sale is reproduced above.

He is also considering offering to write customized stories with his friends' names inserted as heroes, in which they defeat a villain of their choice. (In order to prevent unpleasantness, I have specified that the villains are to be fictional only and bear no resemblance to any mutual acquaintance.)

Meanwhile, from the art of economics to the economics of art: artist and lecturer Roger Boyce has a few thoughts of his own on serious money and art in post-quake Christchurch.