A fresh look at the familiar

Doug Hart likes to have fun with his watercolours. Photo: Stephen Jaquiery
Doug Hart likes to have fun with his watercolours. Photo: Stephen Jaquiery
Doug Hart might be retired but he has never hung up his paint brush. One of the Otago Art Society’s featured artists demonstrating their work this summer, Hart tells Rebecca Fox about his love for his adopted city.

If you take Doug Hart at his work, an unsuspecting stranger to the city could think a tunnel is being being bored under Otago Harbour while foot traffic is ferried to the city by gondola or Larnach Castle is perched on a hill in the middle of said harbour.

They are just some of the quirky scenes Hart loves to draw and paint, scenes that make people look twice and then again as they spot yet another detail they had not seen at first glance.

"Obviously none of this exists. It’s all a very flippant look about Dunedin and the harbour.

"Everything really I do is mostly centred around Dunedin’s culture, history, and quirkiness, if you like."

It possibly comes from the fact Dunedin is Hart’s adopted city. An Englishman, he views it with a newcomer’s eyes.

He fell in love with the place when he and his wife came out for six months at the urging of his stepchildren, who had met Kiwi girls and settled here, to see if they liked the city.

"So after quite a lot of thought and then coming out here for six months to see what it was like, we then applied for residency, got it, sold up the house in England, moved out here, lock, stock and barrel in 2013."

Hart was struck by the landscape, wildlife and Victorian architecture of the city.

"People don’t realise that here, when you look up from the shop fronts and you look upwards, you realise how many magnificent buildings are still here."

Buildings such as the Railway Station, court building and those in Moray Pl, among other historic buildings, feature in his work.

New Harbour Crossing
New Harbour Crossing
For Hart, it is a way of supporting and saving for posterity the city’s architecture in case it is ever lost, whether it is the Dunedin student quarter complete with burning couches and students on roofs or the Port Chalmers streetscape.

"It is where people live, their student houses, what they do, what they like. It’s definitely a community."

Other work has been inspired by New Zealand literature such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider.

More recent work has been a development on that theme, including waka riding the waves surrounded by wildlife.

"It’s very stylised and it evokes movement of water, sunrise, sunsets, albatross, even down to the oars that they use for the waka as well. And the wildlife that swirls around underneath them, beneath them and so on."

It is a style he has developed over the years since he took a Photoshop course when he retired from primary school teaching.

Keen on art since he was a child, he has always drawn and painted. He taught art and technology and over the years did murals for children’s bedrooms and poster art, keeping his "finger in the pie" in different ways.

Also fascinated by photography, he decided being able to use Photoshop would be a good skill to have. It was during the course he had the idea he would like to paint in watercolour.

"So then I started to think, well, what if I put the two together? What if I put photography and watercolour together to produce things?"

So he began to use photographic images distorted in Photoshop as the basis for watercolour paintings.

As a result, he is always on the lookout for interesting views to photograph — a piece of driftwood in the surf on the West Coast that looks like a dog or a still morning over the harbour at dawn at Port Chalmers.

Waka
Waka
"It’s just a different way of drawing."

His architectural pieces are done completely by hand, first drawn in with pencil on quality paper after he has drawn the frame for the size of the work.

Then very fine indelible ink pens are used for the outlines and detail, then watercolour is delicately painted to bring it to life.

Most of his works are brightly coloured.

"It just comes in my head and I’m just thinking you know, but all these are based on true colours but the architecture ones are exactly true to life.

"But my boat house ones, some are real and some are made-up colours, especially things like the the harbour crossing."

Inspired by the works of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch and American painter Asher Brown Durand, Hart likes to incorporate as much detail as possible.

"I’m very drawn to very particular, meticulous paintings ... lots of detail."

He knows exactly what he is going to draw before he starts. Often all it takes is hearing a word for it to inspire a vision of a piece.

"It’s fun, it’s nothing complicated, although it is incredibly complicated drawing it."

Words or phrases often come to him at night or when he sees something during the day, so he writes them down such as "lunch break" or "form an orderly queue".

Balancing Act
Balancing Act
"Now lunch break to me, I have this picture in my head and it’s a boathouse out here with all the shags lined up and they’re all having a break and there’ll be a man in a deck chair also having smoko.

"Form an orderly queue. Well, that’d be some penguins coming in off the sea. You know, forming a queue out on the beach with inquisitive sea lions looking at them."

Hart held his first solo exhibition at Moray Gallery a couple of years ago.

His works are popular with tourists and can be found in homes around the world.

"I’ve actually been halfway through painting, and some woman has come in and said, ‘I’ll buy that’. I said, ‘Well, I haven’t finished yet’. She said, ‘I’ll buy it, pay for it and you can send it to me when you’re finished’. It’s happened a few times."

He works from his studio at home, painting most days and going in to the art society rooms on a Thursday to work with other members who take advantage of the opportunity of some collegial time together working.

"I’m also quite often found upstairs as I like being with my wife, although she says I’m taking over the house again."

The work has become Hart’s passion.

"I absolutely love it and adore it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, really.

"It’s like I’m addicted to it."

It means he is often reluctant to see some works go.

His more detailed works can take more than a month to complete but if someone wants to buy it for the right price he has to let them go.