Lizzie Thomas is a practising artist who works under her own name as well as the moniker ellaquaint.
She also runs art classes and workshops as Little Art School in Wanaka, and she is a Wanaka Arts Society committee member.
Originally from Auckland, Ms Thomas lived and worked in New Plymouth and National Park before she came across Wanaka as a tour guide and fell in love with the outdoors lifestyle.
"Initially I intended on moving down before Covid hit, but the ’20s seem to be the decade of unexpected happenings and that got delayed. Eventually I made the move to Wanaka three and a-half years ago."
She has always been drawing and making "stuff".
A defining moment was when her mother took her to see a Monet exhibition and she experienced his waterlilies at the Auckland City Gallery.
"I remember being so blown away by their scale, beauty and the energy behind the paint technique."
When she was 9, her family took an overseas holiday and she experienced galleries in the UK and Europe.
"From then on, I was adamant I wanted to be an artist."
She graduated with a bachelor of visual arts, majoring in sculpture in the late 1990s before going on to complete her teaching diploma.
Favourite artists include Barbara Hepworth, Kiki Smith, Fiona Pardington, Ralph Hotere, Seraphine Pick, Bill Hammond, A A Murakami, Cora Allan, Alex Oliver and more.
"I create or encourage others to make art because it is part of my wairua.
"Whether it is creating watercolour illustrations of endemic species or producing more conceptually rigorous works, I need to be making or at least planning new works," she said.
One of her biggest challenges is finding creative space.
"When I graduated, I continued playing around with sculptural processes. However, you need a lot of space to store works, particularly if you are exploring less sellable processes and ideas.
"Many pieces of sculptural equipment and materials are super expensive and involve even more space. Because of that I drifted back to painting again."
A second challenge is acquiring a good stock of materials.
"I honestly couldn’t tell you how much it cost me to set up as my materials stash has constantly been added to, depleted and evolved over the years. Probably a decent deposit on a house!"
"Prices of materials have increased hugely in the last five years, staples like the acrylic paint and Fabriano paper that I teach with, have increased by around 40%. In that time shipping costs have gone up also. It is crazy. Because of that, like other creatives, I have had no choice but to put up the fees for my classes and workshops, as well as my own actual work."
Her favourites suppliers are Gordon Harris, The Ribbon Rose, and Hobby Land. Ms Thomas hopes someone will open a quality arts supply shop in Wanaka one day.
At the moment there isn’t one, though some supplies can be found at Paper Plus, the Warehouse or Mitre 10.
"Because costs have gone up significantly, I have been resorting to trialling some new materials/paper and sometimes getting things off Amazon/Temu; particularly for my classes, to try and keep costs down. I hate not always supporting local stores, but it is what it is."
"To be honest, it is hard to define what I spend on personal art materials and those I use for my classes. For my personal art work it would be in the thousands — let’s say a decent spec'd soft-tail mountainbike on special. For my classes, much more than that, at least a couple E versions of that decent spec’d soft-tail mountainbike."
Ms Thomas has earned a full-time living off her ellaquaint artwork at various times but has found it is not easy to maintain momentum.
"That is why most artists have to have a paying job and just do their art on the side. For some reason our society doesn’t seem to value arts/culture as much as it could do.
"The figures that Creative New Zealand released in 2022 exemplify that: the average creative earns a median total income of $37,000 a year.
"It seems that because we are passionate about what we do or create, there is this idea that we should for some reason not expect reasonable remuneration, yet our investors are able to potentially make considerable profits on our work, should the art world deem our efforts, practice and provenance worthy.
"It is wonderful to see that discussions are now occurring in Aotearoa New Zealand with regards to Artist Resale Royalty Schemes," she said.
Ms Thomas says "nice-to-haves" such as art tend to be cut when times are tough.
"Until August last year, things were ticking over fine but then it was like people stopped buying overnight. Since then, my two favourite stockists have either closed doors or evolved.
"The increased cost of living has actually put my own artistic practice in stasis."
For now, she is pouring her creative energy into content for workshops at Little Art School.
Her studio space has also become storage space, because she got rid of the cabin she used to store equipment and work, making her hired arts centre room a bit of a squeeze.
Other artists, especially those without a spare room, have similar problems, she said.
"There are so few affordable spaces, let alone ones that are a decent size. I am so fortunate for the studio that I do have but even when I am in a making phase, it does constrict the scale of my work."
She was among the many who were disappointed the Queenstown Lakes District Council did not include an arts centre for Wanaka in their $2.4billion 10-year plan.
Wanaka’s art community had outgrown its facilities and was evolving faster than Queenstown, she said.
The cost of living means artists are also trialling cheaper products and processes but because she wants her students to have positive results from their efforts she finds there is only so much scrimping that can be done.
She uses decent entry level paper and equipment and recently splashed out on a laser printer to allow for more economical production of visual handouts.
"I hate to admit but I had been using my fine art printer for resources until then!"
Ms Thomas’s shopping list for her own practice is long: pencils, charcoal, eraser, drawing paper, journals, watercolour paper, brushes, masking fluid, Belgian linen, stretched canvas, wooden surfaces, watercolours, gesso, liquid acrylics, normal acrylics, Indian ink, shellac, and more.
Sometimes artists go in together on orders to save shipping costs. They will also share equipment or try out each other’s gear before buying.
Ms Thomas has also pulled back on travel and changed her eating habits.
"Overseas trips are definitely not on my radar at the moment [and] even taking off over the hill to visit friends in Queenstown has not been happening like it used to.
"My supermarket shops hardly ever involve cheese or red meat now. But to be fair, all of those above things mean that I am living more lightly on the planet, so that is a positive outcome of it all."
One thing that irks her?
"The myth of the starving artist in a garret greatly frustrates me. I am sure it has been partially responsible for setting up the expectation that artists ‘must suffer to make great art’ or at the very least, to expect less for their efforts.
"However, at the same time I am currently living in an RV to keep my living costs down so that I can still have some ‘nice to haves’."
But she sticking to her art practice because it was "food for the soul".
"It can be our social conscience, it can bring us a reprieve from the everyday, it can challenge our beliefs, it can allow us to feel more connected and it can just beautify our walls or our skin.
"If we didn’t have access to art in its many forms during Covid, I think we would have had a much rougher time of things. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine living without art."
- Ms Thomas has been working behind the scenes with the Wanaka Arts Society to produce the annual Wanaka Arts Exhibition & Sale this weekend.
