Artist Profile: Chris Wilkie

Chris Wilkie
Painter

Christopher Talbot Wilkie is currently based in Te Anau. He credits his innate ability to render the world around him to his lineage of artistic forbears, including Queen Victoria’s court painter, and Fox-Talbot, co-inventor of Photography. On leaving secondary school he studied art at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University and after many years of secondary teaching finally obtained his Master of Fine Arts at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design at the end of 2003.

Chris is interested in “Pakeha Whakapapa” (European ancestry) and since marrying into a Maori iwi with strong Northland ties his focus has broadened to include the history belonging to his children and their forbears. He has always been obsessed with the play of light on the natural world and the interaction of people with the land, sensing a strong spiritual dimension in the subject he is studying.

“My new works contain a feeling of timelessness; mists and ancestral images flowing over a land steeped in passion and turmoil”.