Eyeing us up with its cool-cat gaze, Joe L’Estrange’s acrylic painting Cat on Windowsill, Corstorphine, 2013-15, reminds us of the pure pleasure to be had in observing the world around us and of the joy we get from the animals who share our domestic lives. It is the kind of painting that draws us in.
L’Estrange is an artist who paints what she sees, with a focus on her immediate environment and the detailed elements of it that have caught her eye. Her current subjects include elevated and focused views of groups of state houses, public buildings, bridges and commercial properties, set against the rich green hills, sweeping dark valleys and snake-patterned skies she can see from the windows of her house in the hill suburb of Corstorphine. The artist’s cats, her garden and the everchanging mix and mingling of plants and weeds and their growing and falling and the changing patterns of life evident in all these living things, also feature in her art.
Intensely observed and minutely rendered details are a feature of L’Estrange’s art and painting style — a tiny helicopter in the sky, a cluster of road workers operating their digger, or as in this case the words "Bunnings Warehouse" writ small on the front of the company’s store near the foreshore. Looking further we notice a rusty coloured cargo ship muscling up the harbour near the Ravensdown fertiliser works, with its steaming chimneys. The Palmer’s quarry cuts into the hillside and the Forsyth Barr Stadium roof and logo are also just visible. In the left-hand side foreground a fragment of Carisbrook, the old "House of Pain" sports ground, remains. Two little yellow excavators can be seen munching away nearby on scraps of metal — the torn-up remnants of its demolition which began in 2013.
All these nods to industrial, commercial, human activity and life are captured by the artist and set within the lush and lovely setting of Otepoti — with its harbour and Peninsula hills, blue-grey and verdant, framed as a view within a mass of foliage including ti kouka /cabbage trees in bloom. The cat appears happy and healthy — tail up, whiskers jauntily curled, bright-eyed and with a pristine coat of fur. What a lucky cat. And how fortunate we all are to live in this beautiful place.
Born in Oamaru Joe L’Estrange attended the Otago Polytechnic School of Art from 1978-80, where she was tutored in painting by Walden Tucker and Bernard Holman. Soon after graduating with a diploma in fine arts in 1980, her work was regularly included in the Otago and South Otago Art Societies’ exhibitions. From 1984 she began exhibiting at the Moray Gallery along with other Dunedin artists.
In 1992 L’Estrange’s skills as a portrait painter were acknowledged when she was awarded The Adam Foundation/New Zealand Portrait Gallery’s Adam Portraiture Award by artist Shona McFarlane, who that year judged the competition. Since 2013 L’Estrange has held regular exhibitions at the Brett McDowell Gallery in Dowling St. Avidly sought out by private collectors, L’Estrange’s art is not well represented in public collections apart from the Hocken, which has sixteen of her paintings, many of them donated by generous supporters. The Hocken is currently preparing a publication and exhibition surveying her work titled Joe L’Estrange: Painter which is scheduled to open on Saturday, November 5. The exhibition will include many intriguing and striking works borrowed from local and private collections.
Robyn Notman is head curator, Hocken Pictures (art and photography).
