“When I make art I am looking for something - a combination of colour, composition and heart. This is what drives me to work. I have to make that thing I am searching for.”  

 

Dorset-born, Dunedin-based painter Eliza Glyn shifted to New Zealand in 2008. After an unconventional education attending both Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti schools in England, Eliza shifted to the USA where she undertook a liberal arts degree at Bennington College in Vermont, majoring in contemporary dance choreography and painting.  After living and working in the States, as well as in Vanuatu, Sydney and Chennai, India, Eliza shifted to Dunedin where the bare bones forms of the landscape and the harshness of light became her chief sources of inspiration.

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“When I first came to Dunedin It was the rawness of the place that got me going. So cold, so dark, and yet so bright! There was paint peeling off houses, orange carpet, and everything was so damp. Nature seemed to be something mined for its human convenience, and not appreciated for its genuine beauty.” From her first home in Ravensbourne, Eliza began wandering the streets of West Harbour, picking the flowers from the edges of gardens or growing from pavements and retaining walls. These modest bunches would accompany her to her studio in Port Chalmers, a source of joy and colour in a landscape that at the time she found powerful and challenging. “I could stare into the face of an orange calendula flower and be brought back to my senses. Forget-me-nots and daisies were no small thing for me.” Determined to uncover the beauty from the new surroundings she found herself in, Eliza began her signature landscape paintings. At first she started by warming up the landscape in order to give a different feeling to the place, once more aligned with her own perspective. And yet those shadows she first identified in the landscape remain ever present in her work. “Colour and light I paint because I need it. I am interested in darkness though. I don't look too hard but I know it is there; in the landscape, in the culture and in my neighbourhood. I put it in all of my paintings. It creeps in from the edges in the form of a bush-covered hill, dark interior of a barn, even in the vase or shadow of some flower stalks.”

 

Eliza’s more recent painting has been slowly moving away from the figurative, delving more deeply into the colour, shades and spaces of the landscape. By boiling nature down to its raw forms and infusing it with a disconcerting presence of being, these works explore the resonant beauty of a city at the bottom of the world. “I’ve come to recognise that I’m always hunting for beauty, a kind of beauty that is not as obvious as the light in India or a hillside in Italy. It takes more examination and my findings are what I put into my work.”  A fulltime artist and mother of two girls, Eliza paints from her studio in Carey’s Bay, Dunedin.