Don Binney
Don Binney describes himself as a figurative painter concerned with the psychic metaphor of the environment. Binney’s paintings of birds, sky, horizon, and the New Zealand environment are iconic within contemporary New Zealand painting.
Don Binney received a Diploma of Fine Arts from Elam School of
Fine Arts, Auckland University in 1961. In 1979, he became a Senior
Lecturer at Elam where he taught for more than 20 years.
Binney's paintings of birds, sky, horizon, and the New Zealand
environment are iconic within contemporary New Zealand painting.
Working in oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink and graphite, his renderings
of birds reveal his ornithologist's eye. Binney depicts the
symbiosis of the environment modified by the creatures that live in
it and the creatures modified by their environment. Inspired
by native bush, Binney portrays "natural stimuli… the wild-life"
with reverence.
Binney's tenure at Elam, during which he was encouraged to
research, comes through in his work that is strong, centred, and
well self-conscious, yet simultaneously each work is but a fleeting
moment in nature. Particularly fleeting are those unpopulated
vistas of the environment. That in itself makes a statement about
the implications of human occupancy on the environment.
Since being included in a survey show of New Zealand painting
held in London in 1965, Binney has exhibited extensively and his
works are represented in public collections internationally and
throughout New Zealand including Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa
Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand.
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