Landed Gentry

New paintings by Claire van der Plas

Artist’s Statement.

This exhibition follows on from the last two year’s paintings of folks and their beasts at A&P shows. So they’re still about the part of me that wants to move to the countryside, raise pigs and chickens, rural bliss and all that.

But this year the stars for the show are ponies, or more accurately, minature horses. These tiny critters are definitely the cutesiest guys and gals at the shows. Dressed to the nines in their tailor made travelling rugs, groomed to perfection, and acting every inch the prima donna.

I used backgrounds nicked from Rococo paintings by Boucher and Fragonard, all luxury gardens, rural playgrounds of the rich and famous. And some of them are 19^th century romantic sublime landscapes, Caspar David Friedrich and Sir Edwin Landseer, not real countryside either, just more townies endowing the great outdoors with fake mystique.

The bits of old furniture I paint on are lovely decorative shapes. Compositional challenges. Using them underscores things in the paintings like the value of craftsmanship, the lure of luxury. And talks about consumption - the tasteful, decorative, useless things we collect and surround ourselves with like pretty pets, fancy furniture and nice paintings.

While the paintings are certainly gorgeous objects and portraits of pretty horses, their over-the-top glamour and their titles give away an unease with the tenability of my dreams to move to the countryside. The sprawl of lifestyle blocks around Auckland grows bigger every year. Townies like me moving out to a few acres of their own make places that look nice, but often reduce the productivity of the land. I'm starting to doubt whether this is such a good thing to want.