JEAN
STEWART
paintings
past work / past shows
Oil on Canvas, 2017.
Oil on Canvas, 2017.
Oil on Canvas, 2017.
Oil on canvas, 2014. Plenty of fun! Orakei Marae Maara runs as a teaching garden which also provides for the Marae kitchen. The garden is managed by Richelle and on-hand garden tutor Judy. They meet every Tuesday and work hard for four hours to keep the garden looking good and producing. The garden is a welcoming space.
Oil on canvas (950mm x1050mm), 2014. This Marae is based around the Maara-garden run by Val and Lionel with the support of their whanau and friends. Each year they grow tons of kumara. While I was painting there was a preschool visiting and all the little ones toured through the garden after being welcomed on by Val. Hearing the karanga ring out across the worked earth and the peace of the place was truly beautiful.
Oil on canvas, 2014. A very tidy meticulous garden just behind New Lynn shops run by a community of New Lynn Chinese Elders. Seeing how well kept this garden was made me think that more public space should be turned over to groups such as these; to look after and grow food in, to share and to feel a sense of protection over.
2018
For the Empire
Anna Miles Gallery
Auckland, New Zealand
2015
Workers in Dirt
Silo, Park / Wynard Park
Auckland, New Zealand
2017
MŌ TE EMEPAEA
–For the Empire
Tairawhiti Museum
Gisborne, New Zealand
Departure Lounge features a series of works by four award-winning artists who have spent the past year creating what they describe as “loving tributes” to the hotel, whose owner Maureen Gordon passed away this month. The Kings Arms is one of Auckland’s oldest hotels and has long been the city’s home of live music. Its demise will be felt by crowds who have flocked to bands as beloved as the White Stripes and The Black Keys, and who recall some of New Zealand’s wildest onstage gigs. The idea for the exhibition was conceived on a night watching Peaches perform on stage. Says painter Jean Stewart: “Knowing that the noise and old wooden floor vibrations would wind up soon was quietly defeating. All the people that had moved through the place, the effort, the energy, the audience, the walls, the carpet;it all
demanded acknowledgement.”
Tawhai Tamepo, a Maori Pioneer Battalion veteran of Waipiro Bay, in a series of war diaries, has recorded beautifully and clearly the moments worth remembering.
His words so measured and polite describe both the horrors of war and the adventures they got to have around the edges of it. The diary moves along from scene to scene like a movie. In this way it seems a very visual record and transposes into images very readily.
I have endeavored with these paintings to depict the images Tamepo documents and present them as memories.
So that the viewer will feel the nostalgia and the dream like quality as they travel through his recordings. The image is there but seen through the fog of time. After all, these events have been re-written by Tamepo himself then remodeled again in paint by me to be presented as shiny little gems of memory, shaking in the wind but still here.
These are paintings of people who spend their everyday lives growing food, in community gardens and small market gardens. This series had a focus on Plein-air painting. The process was to take the canvas into the garden, set up and paint on site. Surrounded by plants and people, working them into edible things. There is a documentary element here a desire to capture an essence of daily life. Also a desire to honour the hard work and amazing achievements I have observed in these people and gardens.
when you come home, oil on board 2011
onward ii, oil on board 2011
support matrix, oil on board 2011
Here We Go Again stranded and about to drown in the next minute, 2004
In Response the Limp Infant, 2004
It was all the Pleasure Birds Whistling, 2004
2004
All the Little Monsters
Fitzroy Gallery
Melbourne
Australia
This series of works saw a transition from abstraction to figurative in the practice. The series was loosely based on the swirling composition of a Turner, wild seascape. Where the eye is lead around the painting picking up meaning on the way. The content depicts four different feelings around one relationship set in time. There is a raw truth to these works that still resonates.
Embedded within both the process and the finished
works is the notion of the everyday. These paintings
are painted in the garage
and constructed from things left over from everyday
life or within reach of
the subject matter, i.e. available to someone experiencing the early stages of motherhood. The effect is that the paintings begin to operate asan extension to daily life rather then being separate from it. To imply meaning within these basic assemblages is to apply meaning to daily life.
– Thesis extract for the degree of Masters of Design
2012
The Nuances of Human Stories
and the Language of Paint
Te Po Gallery
Auckland, New Zealand
People, 2006
Horses in a Backyard, 2006
Leaving, 2006
2007
Eight New Paintings
Synergy Gallery
Melbourne
Australia
"Stewart responded to living in Melbourne's dense urban environment in the heat and the drought at the end of the Howard years by embarking on a series of paintings that captured the intensity of life in the city. These paintings converge on multiple stories: all-moving and butting up against one another, expressing the chaos created by co-habitation and communities. Each painting inhabits its own world and perceptions; literal and abstracted narratives swirl within each work, speaking of the internal and external worlds we inhabit."
– Threaded Magazine
Love of it – Issue 2008