Painting is “all about people and stories”, for Linda Wood Tilyard, who is currently showing Cameo – a brief appearance at the Windows Gallery.
“There’s a tremendous intimacy in painting a portrait,” she says. “I often paint people when they are unwell or struggling with something, and the act of painting feels like I am caring for them. It’s a meditative process for me, the grace of the art of the painter.”
The portraits in Cameo depict family, friends and even the occasional celebrity. But the diverse group is linked by the fact that Linda sees them all as “narrators” who are communicating a response she herself has to the world. “That’s why I have to feel very familiar and close with anyone before I can paint them.”
The celebrity in question is Vanessa Redgrave, who looks out at the viewer from among a bank of clouds. Her body has dissolved into the landscape, and a stream of sand trickles through her fingers, transforming her into a surreal human hourglass measuring the quickly dispersing days.
Linda explains the way she has merged her subject with the landscape here and in other portraits as coming from her experience of arriving in New Zealand from England with her family, aged eight. “I had a vivid experience of immigration. You can’t say you are from this place or that, so you look for wider connections, such as to the earth, sea and sky. And at some point you know the land has claimed you.”
Another portrait features a woman Linda spotted in a café. “She had a wonderful face and I asked if I could paint her.” Over the following weeks, the two met and discovered some common experiences. Fortuitously both saw themselves as travellers, and Linda has portrayed her as a modern day Dick Whittington, accompanied by her cat.
Linda works from photos of her subjects but needs this sense of rapport to progress a portrait. She is interested in goddesses and women from mythology, but be prepared for her versions of Eve, Pandora or Lilith to have Gothic corsets, purple hair and piercings along with traditional attributes. Her archetypes belong to the 21st century but still reveal the age-old themes of desire, loss, motherhood and the fragility of life.
Linda grew up in rural Canterbury and studied at Ilam School of Art. She then taught at Four Avenues independent school, exhibiting at the CSA and Gingko Galleries in Christchurch. She moved to Masterton 20 years ago and has five children. She is a tutor at King Street Artworks and had her first solo show at Aratoi in 2007.
“I’ve only recently started ‘owning’ my own cultural heritage,” she says. This includes Cockney on her mother’s side, and Spanish ancestors. One of the paintings is called ‘Rosie Lea’, referring to the Cockney rhyming slang for ‘tea’. “I’ve shown her wearing pearl buttons and with a teapot…I used to dismiss the obsession with cups of tea but I now see it as an important ritual of people getting together, talking and healing.”
Which is really the essence of Linda’s life and art: people, stories and community.
Cameo – a brief appearance, until 26 January. Also showing at Aratoi: Reflection and Image: Recent works by Bridget Bidwill and Andrée de Latour, until 23 Feb; Close to Home: William Beetham Portraits, until 23 Feb; Apocalypse Now: Anthony Davies; until 23 Feb; Friends of Aratoi Art Awards 2013, until 3 February; Vincent Ward Breath - the fleeting intensity of life, until 28 Feb.