Seeing her work hanging in her first solo exhibition, Belinda Mason pinched herself.
"I’m still surprised, I’m amazed it’s me, that I did it."
For the recent graduate in visual arts from the Dunedin School of Art, it had been a long journey from her first day crying in her car too afraid to enter the school to hanging her latest work First Light at Wave Project Space.
"It’s what you dream of when you are there, having people see what you do, but it is a slog."
Always keen on art and being creative, Mason did high school art and over the years completed painting workshops while working in various occupations — she eventually trained as an early childhood teacher when she had her daughter.
"I’ve been a few things in my life. I started out at 4XO writing advertising."
When living in Kaikoura she did classes with an artist which "hooked" her again. However, it was not until after she moved back to Balclutha, where she was born and raised, nine years ago that she began to think more about how much she did not know about art. She joined Art South Otago and continued to attend workshops and exhibit her work but it was not enough.
"I wanted to go to school and throw myself completely in the deep end."
Three years ago she decided to take the plunge and enrolled in art school to try to fill those knowledge gaps. Having been an adult student when she studied early childhood, she had that experience but was still worried about how it would go as she was in her 50s.
"It was terrifying. The first couple of days I was full of nerves and anxiety but I’ve never really looked back."
She loved immersing herself in all that was on offer at the school, especially the art history classes, absorbing as much as she could from the lecturers and experimenting with different art forms and materials.
"There is just so much to know. Its a little bit about technique and a lot about experimenting. It turns out that maybe I’ve got a little talent, it’s not just love, it’s a passion."
Before going to art school she had worked with watercolours doing botanical, realistic works. At the school she was encouraged to try acrylics and oils. She discovered acrylics were not for her, but after a bit of prompting from her supervisor, found oils to be easier to work with than she had imagined.
"It was a surprise. I loved it. Oils are a lot like watercolour as it is movable, surprising. You never get what you think you are going to get which I really love.
"I liked the possibilities. It’s been a bit of a crash course."
"I love flowers and flower painting."
But the process has not been easy. Mason admitted to struggling at times and wondering "what the heck" she was doing at art school.
"But I’d come out the other side and think oh, you’d get a glimmer or spark."
It took until her final semester for her to find what really worked for her, being able to incorporate flowers and colour in an unexpected way that she "really loved".
"There is lots of colour underneath and the darks. So when you look closely there is colour under the darks."
The initial process of her work remained the same. She starts with photographs she has taken of flowers. She constantly takes photographs of things that catch her eye in her everyday life.
"Dahlias are out in the gardens and my next door neighbour has amazing clematis hanging over our fence — it’s things like that. I get close up."
But she now uses an app on her phone to manipulate and crop the images. When it works, she gets an "oh I want to paint that" feeling.
"When I paint them they become even more abstracted, some you can see the flowers and in the latest exhibition there is bunch of pears. Others you cannot really see them."
She has learnt that painting is a real process requiring going through different steps.
"I’m still learning, still exploring and that’s never going to stop."
Her previous works were generally more A4 to A3 size, but the new ones were large, requiring a physicality that she had not experienced before.
"I’ve really come to love that. It’s really fun."
She is also learning to cope with the varying reactions all artists inevitably receive.
"I’ve learnt its not about what you like, as long as I really love it. I’ve done a lot of things I didn’t like to get to this body of work."
"We had just got into it and it was really exciting. Then we had to go home, it was really hard so last year was so good to be back."
Mason has missed her young charges in early childhood — she worked with under-2s — and the social interactions so now she has finished studying, she works part-time at the local information centre.
"I get to do the social thing and as my boss says ‘talk for a living’ but I’m still working on that balance thing, being an artist, being an employee."
The exhibition at Wave came out of the blue, with curator Kari Schmidt taking a chance on her.
"It’s a big deal for a beginning artist."
She is also working toward a joint exhibition in Owaka in June, for which artists have been asked to respond to the Catlins wildlife.
"It’s a great excuse to keep working as I’ve limited space to where I can stick things. Seeing the glowworms, It was like someone stuck a bunch of fairy lights around a waterfall, it just fit the way I’m painting with that darkness and light," Mason said.
Wave opened last may to provide an additional space for arts practitioners at all levels to show their work.
Schmidt said the idea was to provide a welcoming and really open platform for a wide variety of artists and that it would be non-hierarchical and diverse in its approach.
"I thought it was important to have another space, as I knew quite a few artists at that time who were struggling to show their work. To that end, if someone has shown interest in the space I’ve always done my best to exhibit their work, whether that’s in a solo show or a group context."
Mason’s work seemed to be a good fit as many of Wave’s shows have connected with the natural world in some way, she said.
"I asked Belinda to exhibit on the basis of the works she showed at SITE 2022 (Dunedin Art School graduation show), which I thought were really strong."
Wave, in Vogel St, has one more show coming up in February featuring work by Wesley John Fourie and Nga Roma Poa before it closes its doors as Schmidt is going overseas.
"I see Wave as an iterative process and generally like to relate to projects in terms of lives, phases and stages, with the idea that everything has a season and reason, to be followed by a period of rest and retreat."
TO SEE
First Light, Belinda Mason, Wave Project Space until January 28.
