Bill Sutton
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1917, d.2000
Read more about this artist on WikipediaPrivate Lodgings
- 1954
- Oil on canvas on board
- Purchased 1959
- 630 x 775mm
- 69/111
- View on google maps
Tags: balconies, buildings (structures), night, shadows, urban landscapes, utility poles, windows
About the artist
Bill Sutton’s Private Lodgings captures a sense of the history of a notorious Ōtautahi Christchurch boarding house, the Manchester Private Hotel. This hundred-room, three-storeyed timber boarding house on the corner of Manchester and Southwark Streets had fallen into disrepair. The hotel’s address appears frequently in newspaper reports, starting with repeated requests for replacement porters and kitchen staff. Next to these were frequent court reports documenting varied misdemeanours, its occupants including bankrupts, petty criminals, arsonists, thieves, trespassers, vagrants and one murderer. Further reports spoke of damage from frequent room fires as well as unchecked borer, dry rot and rats, and the late discovery that it operated without a license, leading ultimately to its demolition in 1963.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Exhibition History
Above Ground, 18 December 2015 – 12 February 2017
Prominent Christchurch painter Bill Sutton was an influential teacher from 1949 to 1979 at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. Sutton has chosen here a restricted palette – ochre, brown and black – to portray this aged wooden façade under streetlight glare, with a reflected neon glow of red.
The Manchester Private Hotel, already rundown when Sutton painted it in 1954, was a somewhat disreputable boarding house on the corner of Manchester and Southwark Streets on the outskirts of central Christchurch. Belonging to a series of paintings that Sutton made depicting old, inner city buildings, it conveys the imprint of memory and the local past.
Known as the Manchester Private Hotel, this was a private boarding house on the corner of Manchester Street and Southwark Street. During the early 1950s William Sutton worked on a number of paintings of building façades in Christchurch’s inner city. Rather than accurately representing the building, Sutton was interested in the abstract patterns caused by the shapes of its features and the effects of the street lighting. Private Lodgings was the first Sutton painting to be acquired for the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, the then public art gallery of Christchurch. Born in Christchurch, Sutton studied at the Canterbury College School of Art. He was tutored by many well-known Christchurch artists, including Colin Lovell-Smith (1894 -1960), Archibald Nicoll (1886 -1953) and Cecil Kelly (1878 -1954). Sutton began exhibiting with the contemporary art artists, The Group, in 1946. He travelled to Britain in 1947 but returned to New Zealand in 1949 to take up a teaching position at the School of Art, which he held until 1979. Sutton was awarded a CBE in 1980.
Related reading: Above Ground
Notes
Private lodgings by W.A. Sutton
Private Lodgings is a portrait of a lost Christchurch building that dates most probably from the 1860s.
When Bill Sutton painted it in 1954, it was an increasingly decrepit boarding house, on the corner of Manchester and Southwark streets, just out of the central city - opposite the much more famous Coker's Hotel.
Notes
Yertle the Turtle by Glen Hayward
This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.
Notes
Louise Henderson, Addington Workshops
For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.
Notes
New exhibition: Shifting Lines
Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.
Notes
Rooftops, backyards, urban scapes
As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...
Notes
The Queen's visit by Ivy Fife
This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.
Notes
Factory at Widnes by L.S. Lowry
This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004
Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.
Commentary
Above Ground
I go into the Gallery. Haven’t been there in a while. Building closed. It was open to begin with. Civil Defence HQ in the weeks following the shock that laid the city low and who knew glass could be so strong, so resilient? Then the Gallery closed. It was cordoned off, behind wire netting. Something was going on in there. Someone said something had cracked in the basement. Someone said they needed to insert a layer of bouncy forgiving rubber beneath glass and concrete, ready for any future slapdown.
Commentary
City of Shadows and Stories
If cities are the ground into which we plant stories, the soil of Ōtautahi – later Christchurch – is undergoing a protracted tilling season. Five years is a long unsettlement in human terms; on a geological (or indeed narratological) scale, time moves more gradually. Christchurch exists today as a rich aggregation of narratives, propping up physical edifices of crumbling stone and cardboard.
Article
Shifting Lines
It's where we live: the encrusted surface of a molten planet, rotating on its own axis, circling round the star that gives our daylight. Geographically, it's a mapped-out city at the edge of a plain, bordered by sea and rising, broken geological features. Zooming in further, it's a neighbourhood, a street, a shelter – all things existing at first as outlines, drawings, plans. And it's a body: portable abode of mind, spirit, psyche (however we choose to view these things); the breathing physical location of unique identity and passage.
Article
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.