B.
CASS
Behind the scenes
This week 77 years ago Rita Angus visited Cass on a sketching holiday with Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell that resulted in several paintings including the Christchurch Art Gallery's Cass.
Patrick Dennehy, Transfield Services Ltd, Station Road, Cass (2013)
I recently called in on Cass while driving back to Christchurch from the West Coast and I was immediately struck by just how timeless Rita's scene of that little railway station is. Time stands still. The shed, powerpole, pine trees (although much taller now) and railway tracks with the mountainous backdrop still pretty much the same as they were 77 years ago. I miss that little painting of Rita's.
Patrick Dennehy Cass from above 2013
Related reading: In the Vast Emptiness
Exhibition
He Rau Maharataka Whenua: A Memory of Land
17 September 2016 – 18 February 2018
Canterbury modernist landscape painting from the collections of Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, poignantly revised from within a Kāi Tahu perspective
Collection
Rita Angus Cass
In the autumn of 1936, Rita Angus, with artist friends Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell, took a ten-day sketching trip to Cass – a remote outpost on the Midland Line to Te Tai Poutini / the West Coast. Angus completed several works in oil and watercolour in the following months, all showing her attentiveness to human presence in the sweeping landscape. Built structure and material in Cass, her best-known work, includes railway sheds, a stationary wagon, telegraph poles and stacked up timber opposite a solitary waiting passenger. Other finished works from this visit featured a derelict musterers’ hut, and the Canterbury College Mountain Biological Station with a passing steam engine.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Notes
Canterbury Landscape by Colin McCahon
In 2014 we purchased an important landscape work by Colin McCahon. Curator Peter Vangioni speaks about this new addition to Christchurch Art Gallery’s collection.
Notes
Mountains, Cass by Rita Angus
This article first appeared as 'The wonders of waterolours' in The Press on 11 August 2015.
Notes
100 years of the Cass field station
Last weekend the University of Canterbury Biology Department celebrated the 100th anniversary of the field station at Cass with a symposium on Cass followed up with a field trip to the station.
Notes
Wainui - to the west of the long harbour
"I like Wainui, quaint, charming, rather like a Pieter Bruegel subject with the haymaking in progress." Rita Angus to Douglas Lilburn, 1943
Notes
CASS
André Hemer's exhibition CASS is well worth a visit if you are near the Christchurch Art Gallery's space above NG on Madras street.
Notes
Another nor’wester descends on Canterbury
Some people fear them, others revel in the unforgiving dry heat – love them or hate them the legendary Canterbury nor'wester is one of the defining features of this region in the summer months and there is a real doozy blowing outside at the moment.
Notes
Heart in the high country: Austen Deans (1915 - 2011)
For Austen Deans, OBE, painting was an expression of his love of the outdoors and, in particular, the Canterbury high country.
Notes
Sutton high-fives McCahon
Nothing made it into a W.A. Sutton painting by accident, and the white line that rises diagonally through the sky in Plantation Series II is no exception.
Article
Exquisite Treasure Revealed
Canterbury Museum holds two albums compiled by Diamond Harbour artist Margaret Stoddart. The older of the two, containing images featured in this Bulletin, and itself currently exhibited in the Gallery, covers the period 1886–96. The album is handsomely bound in maroon, and stamped M.O.S. in gold. It contains a sort of travelogue by way of black and white photographs set amongst decorative painting, mostly of native flora, with some locality and date information.