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Expatriate New Zealand artist Philippa Blair creates vibrant abstract paintings that fuse influences from her New Zealand heritage, with the various cities in which she has lived and worked.

Blair’s celebrated career originated in New Zealand at Canterbury’s Ilam School of Art, where her characteristic expressive force was encouraged by Rudi Gopas, Ilam’s influential tutor. Gopas’ preference for emotion over formal theory fostered expressive liberty in his students’ art. Blair’s paintings are unencumbered by formality and a fresh air of freedom resonates throughout her oeuvre.

Movement and the materiality of paint are distinct features of Blair’s work, the spatial dynamic of her canvasses reveal sudden arcs and pivots that recall the painter’s bodily movements. Her paintings therefore have a kinaesthetic quality; they are a record of the convergence where painting meets performance.

Beginning with working drawings, maps, collage and decollage, Blair’s ideas evolve over a number of weeks. Once this practice is exhausted she departs from preliminary drawings and commits paint to the blank canvas in a spontaneous flurry of memory and movement. This approach necessitates knowledge of numerous sensory impulses and memory, as well as a geographic consciousness.

Like the chief protagonists of Abstract Expressionism, Blair paints from above her canvas, thus defying a singular direction, and denying a specific interpretation. Her painterly process is characterised by physicality and spontaneity of gestural force. Blair’s palette has no bounds; contrasting and complimentary colours are applied directly from the tube or dropped, drizzled or splattered across the primed canvass. In recent works negative (white) space has appeared, ironically heightening the presence of colour and the tactility of paint. She manipulates the movement of paint across the surface by rotating her canvas and spilling, pouring, slicing and carving her oils to build and excavate the final image.

There are a myriad of hybrid influences that contribute to Blair’s paintings; music, film, urban environments and the forces of nature are amongst her chief inspiration. Blair’s paintings convey the energy and performance of dance, as well as L.A.’s seismic environment, the excitement of Hollywood, architectural surroundings and the vast Pacific Ocean.

Although entirely abstract, landscape features often influence Blair’s compositions. Memories of growing up in New Zealand’s South Island are apparent in compositional allusions to the Southern Alps. Geographic references also exist in the grid structures of road and city maps that have found their way onto Blair’s canvases. As an inveterate traveller, Blair suggests that maps provide a means to become acquainted with foreign lands. Sprawling Californian freeways or intricate Florentine city grids are often among Blair’s compositional structures.

During the past decade the unpredictable, exciting nature of L.A life has become a dominant muse for Blair’s art.

“My present base in LA is literally between active earthquake

faultlines and everyday violence, be it elemental or human, with

flashes of unbelievable beauty, ecstatic surprises and windows,

digging, scraping and tooling new ways of making paint ‘move’.”

Blair’s recent paintings explore shapes and forms referencing different languages. She suggests that learning to speak, stutter and mutter is not solely aural, but visual too, a notion explored in her art to reveal the burial and revival of languages ancient and modern, seen and spoken.

Success in the cut-throat U.S. art market has cemented Blair’s international reputation. Following her early exhibitions in New York’s Shippee Gallery, she made significant headway during 1990, with Ralph Hotere and Christine Hellyar in the Three From New Zealand exhibition, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Since then Blair’s career has exploded, forcing her to tread an unfamiliar but exhilarating path to international success.

Blair’s work is held in all major New Zealand collections, and in many of the United States’ such as the City Bank, General Electric and Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Collections.

Blair’s viewpoint is not indicative of a particular location, rather it is international. The social, cultural, political and geographic energies Blair’s art encapsulates are suggestive of an exploration of the artist’s mind, and simultaneously the possibility for infinite interpretation.

Passion is abounding in Philippa Blair’s paintings, the vibrancy of language, music, dance, and the rhythmic performance of painting itself are the eclectic forces harnessed by this unique, dedicated artist.