In the stillness between two waves of the sea is the upcoming exhibition by Ōtautahi Christchurch artist Richard Elderton. In this exhibition he distills core elements of colour, paint application, composition, subject matter and sensibility into paintings based on experiences in Japan and Aotearoa over the past year. Ahead of the exhibition he spoke with City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston. In the stillness between two waves of the sea opens 5.30–7pm Tuesday 22 April and runs through to 12 May.
Under the surface, oil on stretched canvas, 305x558mm, 2025
Cameron Ralston: Were these artworks influenced by your recent trip to Japan?
Richard Elderton: Yes. All the works are, to some level, based on experience. A lot of them are based on experiences I had on my most recent trip to Japan last year. The works aren’t a direct documentation of that experience but based on things that I picked up on and kept thinking about, like these turtles and herons I came across.
Were they particularly poignant moments?
Not necessarily in the moment. But over time I kept thinking about them so they must have had some sort of emotional resonance.
You seem quite drawn to the natural themes in your work and life. What attracts you to that?
I don’t know what attracts me. Maybe it is the type of interpretation, unlike action painting or portraiture, for example, which might emphasise the psychology of the artist or the subject, I find that the interpretation of landscapes or even animalia tends to rely more on how the viewer approaches the subject. This show is composed entirely of natural landscapes and animalia. Previously I have worked on imagined landscapes, but had a tendency to frame living subject matters in a more still-life like manner, so the themes and sensibility for these works involve a subtle shift, which is probably a reflection of my mental space in this moment.
What is that mental space? Is it to do with the way you’re working?
It definitely is involved with the way I’m working. I’m discovering that my core direction with art is that I’m interested in how all the different elements come together in a painting. The subject is one of those elements. Because I try to find an internal logic for things, I think about themes that would work on a particular canvas picture plane, work with the oils and brushes that I’m using, and with my general process of painting.
As I said, all of these were based on experience. So, the experiences themselves were serendipitous, but the reason I found myself fixated on them, and ultimately made the jump to base my paintings on those selected subjects, were partly because they intrigued me from a painting perspective. For instance, I wanted to do asymmetrical compositions that use the full balance of the picture plane. When I saw the colony of herons, I saw little compositions in their various activities. For example, two herons were fighting over a female while a different couple were peacefully relaxing in their nest, and one was flying back into the colony after feeding in the rivers and rice fields. I thought I could probably bring these little compositions together in a bigger plan. There’s that sort of structural formal side to it. But also, I think on a personal level, there’s a kind of escapism or transference. There’s a lot of tragic things going on in the world and I find that nature is a great solace, and it has a timeless quality. I find for me there’s a need for that right now. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to solely focus on natural themes this time.
Resounding Heights, oil on stretched canvas, 334x530mm, 2025
It can be difficult to make art about heavy or political themes?
Yeah, it is difficult. In the past, especially at university, there was a time when I had a particular interest in trying to deal with the darker themes of humanity. And I remember coming to a difficult realisation that there was no practical way of approaching those themes of death, suffering, moral corruption directly through my method of painting. Eventually, I started looking at it from a different angle. And I have become more interested in finding ways to create paintings that still resonate with people’s awareness of what’s going on in the world. It’s not totally divorced from life. In the back of my mind, I hope that people who are going through different experiences can still look at these works and feel something worthwhile.
In reading some of the things you’ve been posting online, you talk a lot about refining your work or coming back to the core elements of what a painting is.
I frequently revisit two essays by TS Eliot. Tradition and the Individual Talent which he wrote early on in his career, and an essay called Frontiers of Criticism, which he wrote much later in life. They sort of connect. He talks about how to deal with tradition, how to deal with your personality. He presents this thing called the impersonal theory, which to my interpretation is how you make art go beyond just a mode of self-expression. You let it enter a sort of collective awareness. In order to do that he, I think, convincingly illustrates that artists and poets must refine their craft to a degree and work with understandings of artists and poets that came before them. And be quite conscious about the structures and forms of your art. Not just imitating what people did before you but sometimes rejecting that. I don’t think that’s the universal truth or whatever, but for the way I work, I like that idea, and it seems to suit my temperament.
You’ve talked about five core elements in your artworks. Colour, paint application composition, subject matter and sensibility. Is that something that you came up with?
Yeah, it’s my manifesto. No…well, when I try to come up with an explanation, or just try to clarify things for myself, I find that these five elements just about sum it up. These are usually the things that I’m thinking about when I’m working. I kind of bounce between these five ideas.
What do you mean by sensibility?
Sensibility ties back into culture and tradition. On the one hand, there’s a subjective thing –my upbringing, my experiences, my emotions – but on the other hand, I think there’s an intersubjective thing, which is what I was talking about with tradition and a collective understanding that develops through history, whole cultures and people engaging in a collective sphere of thought. I think sensibility comes from your perspective when you’re aware of, to an extent, the context or the wider cultural themes that resonate with you.
Terns of Birdlings Flat, oil on stretched canvas, 305x558mm, 2025
Do your works have a unique kind of cultural sensibility?
I think I had a fairly unusual upbringing which has affected the way I see the world in a somewhat unique way. I think the Japanese aesthetic influences are noticeable in this body. The koi, the turtles, and the herons. But it was also about finding a balance. I painted the terns that I came across at Birdlings Flat. I find the forms of the terns resonate with my cultural sensibility. Which is sort of a bicultural cross between Japanese, Western and kiwi influences. With all the paintings, I tried to look for a balance where the forms and the emotion settle well with the fabric of my own cultural heritage.
Are you building on your previous exhibition at City Art Depot ‘Aida_間_.’? You talked about the aesthetics of aida, or ma, with that exhibition as being kind of like a space in between things. You’ve titled this show In the stillness between two waves of the sea. What is the link there?
The title of this show is a reference to an Eliot poem. But definitely this body of work feels like an extension or sort of a building on my last exhibition, and even the 無常 (mujō) exhibition before that. I love this line, because it beautifully captures an idea of ma and the Buddhist idea of mujō-kan (impermanence); while the space between two peaks of the sea might appear still on the surface, the tide is inevitably rising and falling underneath.
But from a strictly formal point of view, I wanted to do these compositions that made use of the rest space and pause again. Where to have focal points and how to transition between forms. Giving this pictorial space, breathing room and atmosphere.
I think they’re very successful in that.
I was talking with some artist friends a few months ago in one of our occasional critiques. And they helped me realise something about the subject matter: one of the things that caught my attention when I found the animals, was that they seemed to have a whole world of their own. The turtles were just sort of resting on the platform and drying their shells out, but they were all facing one way, as if they were seeing some spirit that was invisible to the human eye. As a person just looking in from the outside you could never understand what they’re thinking, if they were thinking at all. But I liked that kind of distance and space between the subject and myself. I was interested in that idea of nature having a whole system of information and communication of its own, that people are not really totally part of. That idea of looking into a world from the outside.
Salience, oil on stretched canvas, 334x530mm, 2025
Are you quite self-critical of your paintings? How does that affect the making process for you?
Extremely self-critical. It makes it bloody hard. A lot of these works have gone through multiple renditions, sometimes multiple canvases. I have done lots of studies for all of them. For example, I found this colony of herons, so I visited them every day for a few days and recorded them just sort of squawking in the trees. Based on that footage, I made many drawings and studies trying to figure out the internal compositional dynamic of two or three herons interacting. And then trying to make that work with four or five herons and then as a picture as a whole. That process was quite tedious, but it’s just something I find is necessary to work through.
Even though they have still or calm spaces, the paintings have a little bit of drama. Especially with the animals and people, there is an implied movement and life. Is it important to you that they contain those dynamics and stories?
In a way I think it’s central, but I don’t want it to immediately jump out at you. To me, even with images that don’t have the animals like the sea, the placement of the horizon line and how the lighting works in that composition –– those things have, I don’t know if narrative is the right word, some emotional, dramatic significance. So, that’s something that I’m conscious of.
Are you still dissipating the composition and paint towards the edges of the canvas?
I’ve gone closer to the edge, but I am still using that. I’m trying to paint in a way that goes from the centre outwards. As opposed to how at art school they tend to teach you that your strokes ought to continue right off the plane, so the gesture doesn’t fold and bend at the edge of the canvas. But I like the idea of inching towards the edge. Rothko did that where he would inch towards the edge of the picture plane or the edge of another form. There’s a kind of tension that comes out of that feeling of how to interact with the edge. I think that the edges are also important because they are the transition, or space, between an illusory or pictorial reality and the physical reality we occupy. So that’s an interesting jump to think about.
Wildflowers, oil on stretched canvas, 300x400mm, 2025
In relation to that, I’m interested to know about the black framing on Wildflowers.
I did struggle with the frame on that artwork. I had the motif down, I had done some studies, and I was happy with the image of the flowers and the water trickling. I wanted to create a framing device that acted like a window. But when I’d made it look like a window it became one of those trompe-l’œil paintings where, in classical paintings, sometimes artists would do like a fake frame which the character comes out of. It just didn’t have the right feel. So, after many tests, I decided to strip it down to these basic rectangular forms that overlap or inch towards each other like a Joseph Albers or something. It can be read in multiple ways. Depending on the interpretation, the frame might recede like a tunnel, but it also has a sort of Greenbergian flatness about it, or it might even evoke a subtle sense of movement. That’s the balance that I eventually found.
I’ve heard you talk about your new work as being made in quite an academic way. What does that mean?
Old painting academies, ateliers, had a reputation for working in a very structured way. Until the previous show, I tended to have a general idea of what I wanted to do and then try to work it out on the canvas. But I wanted to change my method for these. I stretched out the process into sketching and watercolours. Working things out outside of the canvas and then bringing that process back into the canvas. So that’s sort what I meant by academic.
Are you still working with some kind of intuition and responsiveness to the painting?
Yeah. I can never completely figure everything out and just transfer it onto the canvas, and that’s not really my intention. I generally start the oil painting, or I would come up with a thumbnail to base the oil painting on in a sort of loose way. As I progress, I’d run into some issues, and I’d take a moment to critique my works and figure out what isn’t working with that internal structure and logic. How are the different elements kind of failing to come together in a coherent way. Based on that critique, I’d try to work out some ideas on paper with drawings and watercolour sketches. From there I’d take that back into the oil painting. So, it’s a bit of preparing, a bit of thinking, a bit of feeling, and a bit of just doing to see where the painting takes me.
