Don Binney 'Kereru over Dunedin'

While studying design for a Diploma of Fine Arts at Elam 1959–1962, Don Binney had settled on a subject matter drawn from certain characteristically local motifs: native birds, Victorian wooden architecture, modified landscapes. The pioneer of modern birdwatching in New Zealand, Richard Broadley Sibson (1911–1994) was Don Binney’s Classics master at King’s College in Otahuhu. “Sibi” had helped found the Ornithological Society in May 1940, and was its president from 1952-54 when Don Binney was a schoolboy.

King’s College had its own Bird Club, and Don was a junior member of Forest & Bird. He later wrote, “In birdwatching I found the way to enter the landscape and know it as an environment”. Using the hard black outline and layers of flattened forms characteristic of Japanese woodblock prints as interpreted by the Australian bird artist Vaughan Murray Griffin (1903–1992), Don Binney transformed images of airborne native birds such as tui, kererū and kākā into icons of New Zealand identity.

In 1963, the year this painting was made, Binney had just finished a year at Teachers’ College and was 23 years old. He was already a highly regarded painter whose first solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery in Symonds Street in October of that year was a critical success. Marrying Australian-born historian Judith Musgrove, he started work as the art teacher at Mount Roskill Grammar School. His second show, held at the Ikon Gallery in October 1964, immediately sold out. From it the Auckland City Art Gallery purchased the iconic Pipiwharuauroa Mating painting. By this stage his paintings were featuring in the New Zealand Herald as Picture of the Week, and his work became so sought after that he was able to leave school-teaching in 1966 to concentrate on commissions and overseas exhibitions. He did not return to teaching until he joined the staff of the Elam School of Fine Arts as painting lecturer in 1974, a position he held until his retirement in 1998 at the age of 58.

Interviewed for the May 1966 edition of the Barry Lett Galleries newsletter to coincide with his Auckland Festival exhibition, Don Binney responded affirmatively when asked if there was a peculiar sort of light in New Zealand that influenced his way of seeing. The interviewer was a statement made by Auckland Art Gallery director Peter Tomory in his introduction to a catalogue of painting shown at the Commonwealth institute in London in 1965: “in these islands, the Pacific light burns and bleaches, so that in high summer, black and white predominate”. Binney had only been out of the country a few times for exhibitions in Australia, but he reported “seeing New Zealand for the first time after two weeks away…one had the impression of an iron land, strong and clear in this light.” As a fiercely nationalist painter, Don Binney worked to convey the power and simplicity of that vision.

Dominating this image are a breeding pair of kererū, swooping out of a clear blue sky high above the city of Dunedin. Viewed as if through binoculars, Binney’s birds appear generalised, but are represented accurately if not scientifically in terms of scale and colouration. Green and yellow are blended to match the characteristic plumage, with a purple-bronze iridescence on the neck, mantle and coverts of the wings. The underparts of each bird are a brilliant white with a sharp demarcation between the white and blue-green on the upper breast.

At left, piercing the undulating line of the Otago Peninsula is the spire of R A Lawson’s Presbyterian First Church (1873). Between the church and Highcliff lies the Otago Harbour, its lightly ruffled surface glittering in morning light. Attuned to geological histories of place, Binney uses simplified forms to indicate how the Dunedin skyline is dominated by a ring of hills. Forming the remnants of a long-extinct volcanic crater, these shapes loom up to chime with the curves of the wood pigeons’ full bodies.

An assortment of grey-blue geometric shapes define the buildings of the city, with atmospheric perspective turning the background hills behind a soft blue. Complemented by the yellow of a VW Beetle heading north down State Highway 1, the shades of azure and cerulean of the sea, city and sky are balanced by rich tones of emerald green and soft velvety black in the foreground. Ultimately dwarfed by the scenestealing birds, the city of Dunedin is trivialised to elevate the importance of the natural environment as magical and enduring.

Linda Tyler