William Sutton often travelled from his home in Christchurch to the Port Hills, where he made watercolours of amazing crispness and observational skill. In the ambitious series ‘Te Tihi o Kahukura and sky’, Sutton worked his watercolour sketches up into oil paintings of heroic scale and dramatic mood. Even by the standards of the series, this painting is unusual for its uncanny lighting and direct acknowledgement of Kahukura, the Māori spirit guardian who gives the rocky outcrop at the right its name. Rain clouds brew above the hills, as if preparing to reveal Kahukura in his physical form – a rainbow. (Brought to Light, November 2009)