As Best strives to highlight the beauty of New Zealand’s landscapes in her paintings, discovering gold leaf was an eye-opener for the Wellington-based artist.
"It just felt the gold performed a beautiful expression of that narrative of my love of the art. It caught the light in special ways, and it created sort of a dynamic [element]."
So it is especially prevalent in the series of art works she created for "Otepoti Alchemy", her first solo show in Dunedin at Gallery de Novo.
"It's the magic, you know, the alchemy of light and beauty that happens down in the far south."
The works were inspired by a family trip around Otago during one of the breaks in the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. Best, her Danish husband and two children explored the region, taking advantage of all it had to offer.
Horse riding into the mountains for a night near Glenorchy, doing an overnight cruise in Doubtful Sound — "we heard the dawn chorus" — hiking part of the Kepler and traversing virgin snow at the Snow Farm with husky dogs at Cardrona were unforgettable experiences, she says.
"I mean, the magnificence and the majesty of Aotearoa at that point, you know, it's almost overwhelming, isn't it? It's so beautiful down there."
Mountain biking the Dunstan Trail and a visit to Dunedin and Taiaroa Head topped it off as many of her works have featured birds.
"That whole journey that we did as a family just sort of reinforced that idea that I really needed to do a show that felt very southern-focused for me.
"A lot of my paintings that have gone to Gallery de Novo have very much moved in that space of that southern light, that southern colours and feeling that I have."
Best grew up in Nelson so has always had an affinity for the South Island, but that trip reinforced it especially given her family, before Covid, had spent much of its holidays in Europe visiting her husband’s family.
"We've had to travel a lot around the world and I've seen a lot, but, you know, home's home, right? And the beauty here and the magnificence and the calmness and the way that we can approach nature that I don't think you can in Europe."
Just recently she and her husband were kayaking to an island off Island Bay to volunteer with a pest eradication programme when they encountered a pod of dolphins.
"They're just leaping around and they use you like a bath toy, you know. They just kind of like play with you, like you're this big clumsy, unwieldy object, in their beautiful home. It’s quite magnificent."
These experiences continue to reinforce why she does what she does.
"It’s nice that it can have a bigger voice than just an aesthetic on the wall."
The power of art is what hooked Best as a child. Growing up in the country, next door to the Riverside Commune, they did not have the technology children today had, instead making their own fun.
"I don't know why or how, but I used to get clay and make things in clay and then draw on these little clay tablets and I don't know, imagined myself a potter."
Spending time on the commune she was exposed to European artwork many of the residents brought with them to New Zealand.
"They had some really beautiful art. And I remember just sometimes seeing extraordinary things. Like I remember seeing the painting of Don Quixote for the first time ever in my life at one of our Dutch friends’ houses ... And that's when it suddenly kind of became apparent to me that art had a narrative and a story, and it wasn't just something pretty like a cushion."
It made her even more curious about the stories behind art works, but becoming a fine-art artist was not something that was accessible back then. Instead she went to polytechnic and studied graphic design majoring in photography. Her first job was as an illustrator and designer at the Dominion and Evening Post newspapers.
"My family tease me because I've got terabytes, gigabytes of photography. I clearly get so inspired by the light, the way the light will shift on a hill or a piece of water or something like that.
"That's just my magic, you know. That just fills me with joy. And so yes, I did follow a creative path, but it wasn't necessarily fine arts as such."
She worked as a graphic artist for much of her career, keeping painting as a hobby, something fun she did in her spare time.
It all changed when one day a neighbour admitted seeing her painting through the window and urged her to join her next exhibition. The three paintings she put in that exhibition sold.
She said that gave her the confidence to consider art was not just something she did at home after work.
"It was incredible, it had this organic, evolving path."
Then, with the support of her employer at the time, she made the big jump to making painting her full-time job.
"It's really hard to step off what society kind of thinks is normal to have a day job, a regular job with a salary and all that, and step out into the unknown as an artist and try and figure out, you know, how do I do this?"
It was not just the painting, but the business side of it that she had to learn, including how to market and sell her work to make it a viable decision.
"If it's to become a career path that actually has to pay the mortgage and feed your kids, you have to know so much more than how to paint a painting."
The support of her family and their belief in her, helped her through the tricky times.
"It’s been a really interesting journey."
It is reflected in her art work. Recently at a home which had one of her very first paintings ever sold on the wall, Best could see how her work had developed over the past 20 years.
"It still has a straight horizon line in it, a sky element, a water element, and the hills. And I'm like, there is zero change in the content. But the way I want to portray things has evolved.
"It's not that I'm trying to re-create what's in front of me, but certainly what I would term a northern painting has got a different colour palette, a different flow and roll to the hills to what I would call my southern palette or my southern series."
In 2024 she won the New Zealand Millennium Landscape Art Award — Art in the Park and has been the long-term artist in residence for Life Flight Helicopter and was also the Air New Zealand artist in residence for the Wellington Koru Club lounges for a couple of years.
The gold leaf came in about 15 years ago as she liked the idea of a mixed-media approach and having a slightly sculptural element to the interplay of light in the hills.
It took a while to master the art of using the gold leaf. She was initially scared of how much would come off and wasting it.
"I'm really good at it now, and I hardly waste any, and I'm very good at laying it down, and I use a French gilding process, and then I polish it. I enjoy laying the gold down now."
Her pieces in the show also feature a lot of blues, greens and gold reflecting the shadows and change in the light of the South.
"It’s the jewel colours mixed with the earthy tones."
It is important for her to allow herself to be still and quiet in nature to absorb what is around her.
"I find if you get quite mindful about it, you can start to see all these pops of jewel colours, sort of like a moth. You think a moth's a brown flying thing that's not as pretty as a butterfly. But when you take the time to look at a moth, there's all sorts of little pops of jewel colours and gold dust on its wings and there's a sort of a soft atmospheric beauty that I feel I enjoy celebrating as an artist."
Best creates her works in two studios, one in a large commercial space and another smaller space at home, but she is about to give up the commercial space. While it had provided her the space to do large-scale works she realised she could still do those at home if she adapted her practice.
"I'm disciplined. I'm definitely 9-to-5, five days a week minimum. When I'm getting ready for a show, I'm probably, you know, like six days a week and 10 hours a day."
The one thing she misses about a "regular job" is having a team around her to share the load, to help make the decisions and offer advice.
"It’s just sometimes when you've got a lot on your plate, you're like, oh, I really don't want to make a decision about that frame. But you have to."
Best came down for the exhibition’s opening at Gallery De Novo last week and enjoyed seeing her work hung together.
"They display it in such a way they celebrate the overall body of work and not just the individual paintings. And I think when that narrative and that story becomes so resonant and kind of powerful is when you see all of the works together as a whole body, as a whole series."
TO SEE:
Otepoti Alchemy, Gallery De Novo, Juliet Best, until April 10
