Trevor Moffitt, 'Best being forced to confess' (from the Stanley Graham series, 1987, Framed oil on board, 580 x 580 mm.
Photo Credit
- Trevor Moffitt
{Suite} is delighted to present an exhibition of selected paintings by Trevor Moffitt (1936 – 2006). The featured works include two early South Island landscapes, one Gold Miner series work and eight images from the Stanley Graham series.
Gilbert (Trevor) Moffitt grew up in the gold mining township of Waikaia in Southland. During the 1950s he attended the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art and was taught by Canterbury artists Bill Sutton and Russell Clark who, along with Rita Angus, searched for a particularly New Zealand style.
Often confrontational in its honesty, Moffitt’s bold, direct expressionist style was considered almost primitive and this led to slow recognition of his talent. Simplicity was a feature of Moffit's art with his trademarks being thickly applied impasto paint and solid tonally modelled forms. He celebrated New Zealand folklore in a way that no other artist has and was interested in locating the human figure in the land.
Moffitt had his first solo exhibition, a show of Southland landscape paintings, at the Invercargill Public Art Gallery in April 1960. In 1962 he started his Gold Miner series, based on his childhood experience of gold miners in Waikaia.
In 1985 Moffitt started to research Stanley Graham, a New Zealand mass murderer who killed seven people in October 1941. Graham, a farmer and precision marksman, took out four policemen along with two Home Guarders and a civilian before being shot dead himself after a twelve day manhunt. Moffitt chose Graham as the subject for a series because he “felt an empathy for him. The narrative was important – how Graham was and how his life got out of control."
{Suite} is delighted to present an exhibition of selected paintings by Trevor Moffitt (1936 – 2006). The featured works include two early South Island landscapes, one Gold Miner series work and eight images from the Stanley Graham series.
Gilbert (Trevor) Moffitt grew up in the gold mining township of Waikaia in Southland. During the 1950s he attended the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art and was taught by Canterbury artists Bill Sutton and Russell Clark who, along with Rita Angus, searched for a particularly New Zealand style.
Often confrontational in its honesty, Moffitt’s bold, direct expressionist style was considered almost primitive and this led to slow recognition of his talent. Simplicity was a feature of Moffit's art with his trademarks being thickly applied impasto paint and solid tonally modelled forms. He celebrated New Zealand folklore in a way that no other artist has and was interested in locating the human figure in the land.
Moffitt had his first solo exhibition, a show of Southland landscape paintings, at the Invercargill Public Art Gallery in April 1960. In 1962 he started his Gold Miner series, based on his childhood experience of gold miners in Waikaia.
In 1985 Moffitt started to research Stanley Graham, a New Zealand mass murderer who killed seven people in October 1941. Graham, a farmer and precision marksman, took out four policemen along with two Home Guarders and a civilian before being shot dead himself after a twelve day manhunt. Moffitt chose Graham as the subject for a series because he “felt an empathy for him. The narrative was important – how Graham was and how his life got out of control."
