The canvas sat outside David Craig’s bedroom door for 18 months.
Every morning as he walked passed the painting it seemed to be saying to him "I’m good".
He often puts works aside when he is not sure about them, finding it could cement whether they were worth continuing with or not.
"If you live with them for a while some of them are like slow burners."
So when a friend suggested he enter the Aspiring Art Prize, he automatically turned to that piece. To have it then win was a "surprise but not a surprise" in a way.
"It was funny."
The $15,000 art prize comes only about three years into Craig picking up the paint brush in ernest, having spent most of his career in academia and international development work.
"The colours they use are just amazing. They have some sort of incredible instinct for putting colours alongside each other. I was really bold when I started painting because I’d been seeing these bilums."
So in picking up a brush again he knew colour was going to feature strongly; he also knew he was going to have a go at the expressionist landscape — an unfashionable genre at the moment, he says, but one with a rich history that he loved, having grown up around the work of New Zealand artists such as Toss Woollaston (1910-98) and Colin McCahon (1919-87).
"I think it’s this thing in New Zealand art, there are some things and some people and some issues that you have to deal with, right? We had some absolute powerhouses. I mean, McCahon is something else, you know. They’ve staked out territory and they’ve made a claim for certain kinds of truth about the landscape, you know. They were grandiose and mythic and epic."
When his Papua New Guinea tenure came to an end after 10 years of travelling between the two countries, he returned to New Zealand, basing himself in Oamaru for a time, where he began to paint the landscapes of the Waitaki Valley.
"Papua New Guinea’s a hard place, you know? I was so burnt out when I stopped working there."
He then returned to the villa perched on a Dunedin hill with views out over Otago Harbour that he had bought in 2009 when he moved from Auckland to work at the University of Otago’s Dunedin Study and teach sociology.
At the top of the house is a light-filled studio where he has grappled with the need for his gestures and lines to have counterparts in reality, researching closely the work of Woollaston, who studied briefly at the Dunedin School of Art in the 1930s before settling in Mapua.
"I think he’s dead right. If you just start with some abstract idea in your head and then you try and do an expressionist painting, you’re going to end up with a mess. But if the contours are there and they’ve got a formal strength because they’re real, they come from reality, then you can go crazy really with the expression and the colour."
"Brush strokes weave like musical notations, suggesting shifting moods, echoes and harmonies that resonate with memory and place. The composition feels alive and responsive, inviting the viewer to both see and hear the landscape as it unfolds."
There was never any question for Craig that he was going to paint anything but landscapes. He puts that down to growing up in Mt Roskill and travelling down Dominion Rd every day on the bus to get to school and work, looking out at the hills.
"I can draw the line of them in my head now and it’s how it went and like that, you know. So these are the contour lines that stuck with you. It’s been an obsession in a lot of ways."
Wherever he lived, the land’s contours were almost a touchstone for him, but when working in public health in Australian Aboriginal communities — where he did his PhD — he faltered.
"The more I was in the landscape, the more [it was] like I had an organ transplant rejection — there weren’t the lines of the hill. I mean it was stunning but ... there is a bit of fixation [for me] with line and the landscape."
Growing up, Craig’s leaning toward expressionist painting did not go down very well in his art classes at school, and in his Brethren family the emphasis was on the "puritanical" and practical, so pursuing art as a career was not an option.
Instead he went to university, where he studied English literature, and got his art fix through writing essays and articles about artists and culture.
While teaching sociology at Auckland University, he had the opportunity to write about his friend artist Michael Stevenson’s 2003 Venice Biennale installation of New Zealand’s only locally designed and produced car, the Trekka.
A ceramics lecturer at Elam told him New Zealand’s ceramics were as good as anything anyone else was doing in the 1970s and 1980s, and took him to see the pottery collections of artists like Peter Lange and Barry Brickell.
"I just felt the hair go on the back of my neck, you know, seeing these pots."
It was the beginning of an extensive interest in pottery, especially the work of Brickell, which Craig began collecting, and now fills his villa.
"Barry immersed it in our colours of the bush, the glazes that he used. So I was intrigued by this. I ended up going to Driving Creek Pottery in Coromandel where Barry worked. And he was famously secretive. But one day I bought a big bowl off him and said, ‘I really think that if I spend this much money, it would be nice to be able to thank Barry personally for it’. And we just started talking and we never stopped until he died."
When he moved to Dunedin he would often, on business trips to Auckland, personally courier up a particular local clay in ice cream containers from the city to Brickell, who had spent time in Dunedin in 1975.
In 2013, Craig co-curated Barry Brickell’s touring retrospective "His Own Steam" and co-wrote the retrospective book, of the same name, with Greg O’Brien.
These days, aside from painting, Craig has a small overseas project waiting on funding, is working on a book with a colleague that they started when working in Cambodia about how to do peacekeeping post-conflict — something he says is just as important in today’s world as it was a few decades ago — and is also finishing a novel that he started in 1994 when living in New Plymouth.
"The novel is just pure joy. I think I would have been annoyed if I hadn’t done either of them. God knows whether they’ll be as good as we dream, but you know. So it’s a very nice life at the moment."
