Simon McIntyre

Born in Wellington, Simon McIntyre was raised in a home in which art was part of family life. From an early age he was encouraged to look for the structural elements and balance of colours in a landscape and by watching his father he became familiar with the act of painting and qualities of oil paint. At art school he experimented with some pure abstraction, but did not find it fulfilling. McIntyre's early work was based on the structural forms of the landscape seen from afar or above. In these works he was strongly aware of McCahon's simplifications and distillations. When McIntyre came to Auckland in 1979 after a period overseas he lived for a while in the central city, and his paintings reflected the shapes and colour areas of rusty roofs, commercial buildings and construction sites. After moving to live near the sea in Devonport in 1985, he developed an interest in the shapes and colours found in harbours. Here he found rust stains on white paint; the horizontals of decks and the curves of bows and sterns and the many hues of boats' hulls. McIntyre assimilated all this and interpreted it in an extended series of semi-abstract paintings. Since 1990, McIntyre's work has become progressively more abstract while retaining many qualities of his earlier work. After a period of intense drawing, identifying motifs from his local environment, he took a new direction, flattening out the space in his paintings, muting the colour and making the paint surface more even. His palette has always been limited to stress the graphic elements in his compositions, and now his colour has assumed a subtle, unifying quality.