“Writers on my work are fond of quoting me as having said, many years ago, that I wanted to paint the light, but only after it had been absorbed into the earth. It is true. Therefore, yellow ochre is my only yellow. I don’t need any brighter… Similarly, I need only earth reds, light red and Indian red…”¹  

Selected Works, drawn directly from the Toss Woollaston Trust, must be categorised as an exhibition of considerable importance, demonstrably reminding us of and reasserting Woollaston’s true significance in New Zealand art and that, as Charles Brasch wrote, “Woollaston was one of the first to see and paint New Zealand as a New Zealander.”²

Covering almost sixty years of Woollaston’s “single-minded devotion”³ and oeuvre, Selected Works has three constituent elements: his acclaimed watercolours, ink and pencil drawings, and oils. While the primary focus is upon his landscapes, there are also two major portraits, two watercolours and an ink drawing which demonstrate his telling use of line, colour and form, reminding us that portraiture for Woollaston was career-long, where the emotion of the subject and his connection to the person was the over-riding painterly concern.  

There can be no doubt that Woollaston was a regional painter and that the Nelson and West Coast landscapes were his primary source material and preoccupation. However, while this may be true, equally in no sense can his works be said to be topographical renditions: his goal was to deliver contemplative, emotional responses, animated by feelings of immediacy, delivered with a unique interplay of rhythms and forms. He undoubtedly achieved this. His are landscapes of feelings, moods and emotions just as much as of mutating forms and light.⁴

In the watercolour landscapes, we see Woollaston’s intuitive, gestural style imbued with swiftly written notation, bordering on music with paint. His spontaneous brushstroke and islands of colour stand apart from all that came before and since. His are landscapes where mountains are paraphrased into folded forms and blocked line, where smears, blobs and strokes of colour do all the ‘talking’. Fundamentally, these are visual narratives of emotions and sensations, energised by the side-by-side angularity of altering shapes and earthy colours.