The traditional and contemporary art worlds collide in Dunedin tomorrow when Luke Hollis unveils his latest exhibition. Nigel Benson talks to an artist who could be New Zealand art's next big thing.
Luke Hollis believes he was born to be an artist.
"I've been drawing all my life. As soon as I was old enough to pick up a pencil I got into it. It just seemed to happen naturally," he says from his Auckland studio.
"Once I made a commitment to art, I fell right into it. I worked at it and worked at it, until I got better. I realise now it's what I'm meant to do."
Hollis opens his first South Island exhibition, "First Impressions", in The Artist's Room tomorrow.
The exhibition will showcase 15 of his brooding works, which are infused with elements plucked from the art timeline.
The Aucklander, who turns 29 on Monday, started his painting career in the unlikely surrounds of his parents' Te Puke kiwifruit orchard.
"After leaving school, I worked in IT [information technology] for four years. But, I knew it wasn't what I really wanted to do," he says.
In 2003, aged 23, Hollis quit his job and backpacked around Europe, where he was exposed to a rich vein of artworks and artists from yesteryear.
It was a defining experience.
"That had a huge influence, probably more than I realised at the time," he says.
"I'm really inspired by other artists; dead and alive. People like Nicolai Fechin, Degas and John Singer Sargent. I've also been influenced by contemporary artists such as Richard Schmidt, Zhaoming Wu, Morgan Weistling and Ron Hicks," he says.
"It's quite an unusual combination, I suppose. But, I like the conceptual, and the guys who inspire me are those who do traditional painting, but with another side to it that is weird and whacked-out."
His paintings mix fantasy and reality, contemporary and traditional, threaded with the realism of his loose and painterly brushwork.
The works often appear benign until inspected further.
Then romantic nudes become malevolent harpies.
"Before I started painting, I was really into sketching. I used to do things that were quite weird and tripped-out. Surreal stuff. I always had a dream to work at the Weta Workshop with Peter Jackson," he chuckles.
Concept and execution are Hollis' raison d'etre.
"I love to experiment and change. I've got an idea of where I want to go, but at the moment I've got too many ideas going on and I'm just enjoying the variation."
Hollis believes in blending life and art and has recently returned to New Zealand after travelling through Vietnam in search of visual artefacts from a new world.
"The culture shock of it was brilliant. I much prefer third-world countries. You see things through new eyes in places like Vietnam," he says.
The self-taught artist has been painting professionally for only four years, but is already being hailed as one of New Zealand's leading young emerging artists.
Within months of embarking on a painting career, he was runner-up in the prestigious 2004 Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Awards, going one better with a first-equal the following year. He won the People's Choice Award the same year.
Sell-out exhibitions quickly followed, with "Expressions" in Whakatane in May, 2005, and "Grace" in Tauranga in December, 2006.
He has already sold four of the 15 paintings which will be unveiled in "First Impressions" tomorrow.
Hollis is nonplussed by the fuss and is disinclined to take the scalpel to the rose.
"I'm not really sure how I put it together, really, and I don't really need to know. I get most of it from my imagination. I like that mixture of the old and the new. The traditional paintings probably sell best, but some people prefer my weird stuff."
But, even for a wunderkind, the artistic life can be a struggle.
"It is hard to make a living as an artist. The gallery takes 40% and then the taxman gets a quarter of what you have left. It's really hard. They reckon one in 1000 artists manage to make a a living out of it. Even some of the artists doing well have to have a job on the side," he says.
"But, I'm an optimist and things are looking good for me.
"I'm as curious as anyone to see what's going to happen next."
