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| Don Binney |
Don Binney is popular for his large scale paintings of native New Zealand birds against characteristic New Zealand landscape backgrounds. Born in Auckland in 1940, Binney’s interest in ornithology has been present from a young age and first appeared in his art while studying at the Elam School of Fine Arts in the early 1960s.
Since this period, Binney’s painting has focussed on the West Auckland region, specifically Te Henga (Bethell’s Beach) and the Waitakeres. His art contains a covert environmental message, foregrounding birds in exaggerated scale to emphasise their beauty and presence within the landscape. Another recurrent device is the naming of locations by their Maori names as a means of drawing attention to the indigenous histories of his landscape subjects.
His art is typified by a hard-edged, realist style, responding to the crisp, clear light experienced in New Zealand. Flattened spatial relationships and broadly defined sections of sky, sea and land, emphasise the vastness of the natural environment. When featured in his landscapes, man-made structures are dwarfed by the immensity of their surroundings.
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