Patriarchs Bay of Islands

Harold Coop is a New Zealand artist, working in the field of contemporary landscape and abstracted landscape. He has had numerous one-man exhibitions throughout New Zealand, and has also exhibited in France, England, and Australia. He exhibited first with the then Auckland Society of Arts in 1959. He was later a judge for the Bledisloe Medal in landscape painting awarded by that Society. He has been a guest contributor to International Artist Magazine, and is included in the book New Zealands Favourite Artists by Denis Robinson. A book about his painting, A Vision of New Zealand was released by Saint Publishing in 2007. Two works have been placed in the Governor-Generals Auckland residence and a diptych in Auckland City Hospitals Fisher and Paykel Education Centre. His largest work is a 7-metre long illuminated mural near the entrance to Auckland University's School of Medicine, opposite the Domain gates. His work radiates a love of the diverse unspoiled New Zealand landscape and the very visual experiences, with which New Zealanders find themselves surrounded. He believes artists should be using, in creative landscape, many lessons from past and present masters. Extensive visits to Europe exposed him to the use of gold in the work of icons, illuminated manuscripts, and Gustav Klimt, also to the work of European colourists. He has now combined these influences with his decades of water-colour expertise. Turner taught us the power of atmospheric imagination. In Harold Coops paintings can also be found the visual interplay of rectangular shapes and colours as taught us by Mondrian, the abstraction of buildings and landforms of Lyonel Feininger and the power of Bridget Rileys shimmering bands of colour. New acrylic media allowing use of washes, as in the adventurous American water-colour school, and also metallic pigments, have enhanced his creation of precious icons of the New Zealand experience, midway between landscape and abstraction. The gold colours are used, as by medieval artists, to signify something precious, in this case our land.