This story was originally published on The Spinoff.
This Sunday a quietly powerful observational documentary, Grace: A Prayer for Peace, is premiering at the NZ International Film Festival. In the film, renowned painter and printmaker Robin White pours natural pigment over bark cloth with a group of collaborators in a parking lot, eats peaches in her home, and figures out the direction of new works in Japan and Kiribati.
A particularly arresting moment begins with White looking over a series of her now-iconic landscapes from the 1970s which made her a key figure in the regionalist movement of 20th-century New Zealand art. Buildings, cars and mountains are flattened and stylised. White looks at them and says, “this is me as a young painter trying to figure out how to paint”.
