Paul Nash was a member of England’s Society of Wood Engravers in the 1920s, and this work, one of his earliest wood engravings, highlights his instinctive approach to the medium. Rather than be tied down by traditional wood-engraving practices of precision and accuracy of line, his mark-making is free and immediate. A jagged, hard-edged perspective intensifies the scene. The waves breaking on the seawall form a series of varied, simplified patterns and shapes. The elongated figures, dwarfed by the wall, intensify the scale of the structure. Nash’s rough and intuitive techniques in cutting the end-grain wood serve to intensify the image and highlight an artist approaching a medium with much tradition under his own terms.

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016

One of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most talented printmakers, Leo Bensemann was a natural with the notoriously difficult wood-engraving medium. The potential for highly detailed imagery suited the artist, and here he has cut the patterns and shapes with painstaking care. Shurrock encouraged printmaking with his students, and the similarities between cutting away the surfaces of wood-engraving or linocut blocks and carving sculptures would have no doubt appealed to the teacher.

(Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries, 8 March – 13 July 2025)

Nature was the predominant theme in Eileen Mayo’s work throughout her distinguished career as a printmaker, painter and designer. She wrote and illustrated numerous books on subjects as varied as seashells, birdsand cats, including her monumental book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution (1948). She was fascinated with the variety of forms and shapes of plants, and her subject in this work reflects the year of the seasons, as opposed to the calendar year, that begins with the emergence of spring flowers such as these crocuses.

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016