John Drawbridge - The Protest Works

One of New Zealand’s leading and most accomplished artists, Drawbridge was awarded an MBE in 1978, and in 2002 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from Massey University. His work is held in some of the world’s most celebrated collections, including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His public works in NZ include the 42m long mural in the Beehive Banquet Hall, Wellington; the Expo ‘70 mural for Osaka, Japan (now at Auckland University); the NZ House mural, London (now at Victoria University, Wellington); and the stained glass windows and Stations of the Cross in the Home of Compassion, Island Bay, Wellington.

Drawbridge was a brilliant and diverse visual artist. In a career spanning over 50 years, he created a challenging, exciting and varied body of work. His Wellington studio overlooked the Pacific Ocean and he often explored the nuances of the coastline and ocean in his paintings and prints. Interested in what he called the “atmospheric elements of the earth and in humanity”, he experimented with how combining intense colour and delicate mark-making could create rich experiences for the eye and mind. Unusually for him, this work responded to a political issue – the testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.

The Protest Works includes a series of etchings created by Drawbridge in 1966 and closely related to his raked oil paintings of the early 1960s. Here Drawbridge creates a series of raked lines that flow around, under and over each other, a satisfying visual equivalent of the movement of the wind through the air, and a perfect matching of process, media, and subject.