The featured image is an article published in the Whakatane Beacon. The txt displayed reads as follows:
Kathy Forsyth
Arts reporter
People of Whakatane will recognise the scene in Angus Collis award-winning painting, Obsession. “It is actually the Whakatāne Croquet Club,” he laughed. The painting, oil on canvas, has scooped the Best Landscape 2024, sponsored by Peak Accommodation, at the Craigs’ Investment Aspiring Art Prize. Collis, who exhibits nationally and internationally, and has work in private collections, is pleased to have been named a winner in the prestigious art competition. The painting depicts a well-lit after- noon scene of a manicured bowling green. “That was the starting point but a whole lot of other stuff is going on in the work – challenging perspectives, flattening the image, playing with abstraction and realism. The lawn ..
it is almost an abstract piece in itself,” he said. As the fading light envelopes the scene, it prompts reflection on the banality of life, he writes about the scene. Collis said he liked to play with technique in his work: “Challenging very traditional means of making work and trying to come up with something original that is interesting.” The painting reminds him of when he was young, mowing lawns. “There was a bit of an obsessive nature about it.” This obsessive theme runs through his paintings. “I talk about man versus nature, not necessarily saying it is good or bad, or anything like that, just there is this obsessive kind of neatness to everything and in a way that is the kind of slightly surreal element I like to play with as well.” Landscapes, forestscapes and more make his work quite diverse, but there are commonalities in the work in his application and experimentation with technique, and contrast in light, scale and tone. Printmaking techniques are also of interest to him in his recent work. Collis, who grew up in Kutarere, first trained at Elam Art School as an 18-year-old, but finding he could not relate to the conceptual ideas, he moved to Otago Polytechnic School of Art, where he enjoyed the focus on technique, craftsmanship and experi-mentation. Later, in Auckland, Collis was part of a successful art collective that exhibited regularly before he embarked on a decade-long stint in Spain. He held well-received shows in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. Collis and his wife returned to New Zealand in 2018, where he paints in his studio on their Ōhiwa Harbour.
