B.

APE
Orang-utans are hairy, orange apes. They live in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra and swing through trees and vines in great flying leaps. Tarzan got this idea from orang-utans!

BAKED BEANS
Holding her spoon like a rattle, baby Sarah takes another mouthful. Sarah is Michael Smither's daughter. The cat really looks like it wants a cat door ...
There are lots of B words in this painting. How many can you find? Five is good … ten or more is amazing!
baked beans, baby, breakfast, bib, bowl, book, box, bench, blonde, boiled egg, broken egg, black cat, (and quite a few blue things).

CARROTS
a silly alphabet poem
animal, boy, carrots dangling,
encouraging forward:
“giddyup horsey!”
it jolts,
keeps lurching,
moving now
(“oh please! quicker!”)
restless sitter thinks:
“undersized vegetables
won't 'xcite your zebra!”

DIRTY DISHES
D also stands for difficult and detailed drawing! But what about dinner? Was it a disaster? Now it looks a bit disgusting …
This drawing was made with charcoal, or burnt sticks of wood. How many burnt matchsticks can you find in this drawing?

ELEPHANT
It's time to pack up the circus and to get ready for the next town. The elephant helps by pulling a heavy wagon out through the open tent door.
Olivia Spencer-Bower loved everything about the circus, and went back many times with her sketchbook and watercolours when it came to Christchurch in the early 1940s.
Q: How can you tell if there's an elephant under your bed?
A: Your nose is touching the ceiling!

FOAL
Lucy Kemp-Welch did this oil painting of a horse and its foal in the English village where she lived. She always loved drawing horses, even when she was a little girl, and became the most famous horse painter of her day. She also did paintings for a popular version of the book Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.

JOKE!
Concrete, metal, a sponge, a book, a cake of soap… all made from clay???!!! Smiling quietly about this joke is the famous Mona Lisa, by the famous Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci.
When this artwork was being made, Peter Lange's brother, David Lange, had the (serious!) job of Prime Minister.

GRAPES
Louise Henderson painted this in an abstract style. That means instead of making it look real, she wanted to make an interesting arrangement of colours and shapes.
The grapes in a basket are easy to find, but what else can you see?
Q: What do a grape and an elephant have in common?
A: They're both purple, except for the elephant!

KAKAPO
This painting was made for a set of Gregg's Jelly cards, 'Rare and Endangered Birds of New Zealand'. 35 cards were collected in an album, encouraging young New Zealanders to appreciate our precious bird life.

How many of these birds' names did you already know? Two of them also live on $1 and $2 coins!

HELPER
Climbing the driveway to their house on the hill, the man brings in the milk while his doggy helper carries the paper home …
This is Nigel Brown's driveway. He used it in a group of paintings, each one telling a slightly different story.

INSIDE
It almost feels as if you could walk right inside this painting. It looks like a real house, but it's very tidy! Do you think the man and his dog's house looks like this?
There's a group of still-life objects on the table, and another word starting with ‘i'…

Reproduced

MAP
This giant gold heart is also an upside-down map of the world, with New Zealand at the top! It has all been made from chocolate wrapping paper.
Who thinks the artist likes chocolate?
And here's history: a heart-shaped world map was first thought of exactly 500 years ago by a really inventive man called Johann Werner.

OUCH!
These woodblock prints show a painful scene from a kabuki play based on The Tale of the Heike, a famous book about Japanese clans who were fighting each other a long time ago.
The ear puller is Tomoe Gozen, a 12th century female samurai warrior who was known for her great beauty and extraordinary strength.

NIKAU
Nikau are the only palm trees native to New Zealand. They are loved by tui and kereru (wood pigeons) for their juicy red berries. Nikau can live for up to several hundred years.
Nikau can grow taller than the ceiling of the gallery entrance!

TREE
Piwakawaka says
of the Monkey-puzzle tree:
“It would puzzle a monkey,
but it's easy for me!”

PIRATES
Charles Padday lived by the sea in England. Maybe he wished he was a pirate. As well as illustrating adventure books, every year he made large paintings of pirates for a big exhibition in London.
Q: What is a pirate's favourite letter of the alphabet?
A: Arrrr…
Q: Why does a pirate's phone go beep beep beep?
A: Because he left it off the hook!

QUEEN
This tiny painting is of Queen Elizabeth 1, who lived in England over 400 years ago. It was copied from an enormous portrait of this queen that was painted around 1592 by one of the leading portrait artists of those days.
The pirates would like these lovely jewels!

ROWBOATS
R is for…
red rowboats resting
and rippling reflections
with rows and rows of rectangles
changing their directions.

SEA MONSTERS
S is for…
swirling sea serpents
and stingrays and sharks
and strange spotty swimmers
who smile in the dark.
Which sea monster do you like the best?

UNICORNS
Unicorns are usually white, but sometimes they are black. There are a lot of legends about unicorns but nobody knows for sure that they were real. Their spiral horns were supposed to carry magical healing powers.

VERTICAL Vs
Vertical means standing straight up, like a lamppost or a tree trunk. Bridget Riley is famous for making paintings full of stripes and bright colours that are quite hard to look at!
How many vertical Vs can you see?

WEREWOLF
The werewolf is a horrible, nasty creature – a kind of made-up person who can change into a wolf to frighten people. This one must be still practising, because it's not very scary – and so far it has only managed to turn into a jug.

ZIPP
Frances Hodgkins was born in New Zealand and became famous for her paintings in Europe. During wartime in England, some of her things were stolen. She remembered those things by putting them into this wonderful painting.
Can you find a zip, a belt, and some shoes …? Other things here might be harder to recognise.

XEROPHYTE
This painting shows some of the oldest drawings in New Zealand. They were made by early Maori hundreds of years ago at a rock shelter near Waikari, north of Christchurch.
Beneath the rock is a carpet of dry, yellow tussock grass. This plant is a xerophyte. That means it doesn't need much water.
Now there's a good word to know!

YELLOW
The yellow parts of this painting are bright and shining like beeswax or honey. The darker parts are like the surface of a rock.
Is this two yellow crosses or six black squares?