Every artist recapitulates the history of art in their own manner. This process, however, is not an eclectic, grab bag, or random affair. Rather, it consists of constructing passages, relays and stopping points. These may relate to the different periods of the artist’s work, or they may consist of lifelong gestures toward and affinities with certain historical periods and the problems that survive these periods—certain themes and manners of the past that remain alive for the artist in the here and now. In this sense, particular geographical regions and their associated styles and lines of thought may retain fertile possibilities. The artist’s passages, relays and stopping points will often involve intense engagements with the work of another artist or school of art from the recent or distant past, including the associated philosophical, literary, political and scientific milieus within which they arose.

Many of my passages, relays and stopping points through the history of art are a recapitulation of the work on paper: watercolours, gouaches, drawings and collages, but I've found inspiration as well in mapping, kids’ book illustration, letter writing, architectural drafting, double entry bookkeeping manuscripts, cartooning and Japanese calligraphy, to name a few. On the technical plane, this has involved specific set-ups, materials and tools. Obviously paper as such, a concern for its vast history, its planetary travels from China to Europe via the Arab world, and today circulating absolutely everywhere. Paper has different textures, tones, hues, weights, rates of absorbency, etc. and all these different qualities interest me. But I have a fascination too for sable brushes, Chinese brushes, pencils and pens, conte and charcoal, rulers, set squares, stencils, French curves, drawing boards, certain types of paint and ink, and so on and so forth. And beyond the technical, my set-up also consists of singular items of clothing to be worn, certain stimulants to be used (or not), certain rooms, tables or landscapes to be occupied, particular times of the day and night in which I like to paint or draw, etc. and thus always there are rituals and rites. Making art is a kind of alchemy, but also a fetishism.

Unless one assembles and falls in love with certain materials and tools, certain assemblages of artistic erotica, as it were, then one is inclined to fall into an artistic void rather than projecting out across one. Today the work on paper is regarded as a minor form of artistic expression, not a major one, close to being a craft. After fifty years of an art-life, I’m happy to regard myself as a member of the Sunday Watercolour Circle.
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—Ralph Paine, Notes for an Artist’s Talk

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Paine began exhibiting in the late 1970s. His history includes solo exhibitions with dealers such as Denis Cohn and Gregory Flint, along with a record of shows at culturally significant artist-led organisations including Teststrip, Artspace, South Island Arts Projects and Gambia Castle. He has also completed commissioned projects for many of Aotearoa’s major public institutions and has works in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Hocken Library, National Library of New Zealand and Te Papa Tongarewa.

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