Fake marble and landscapes: The remarkable painting of Walters Prize nominee Owen Connors

Artist Owen Connors is on a roll. They are one of four nominees for Aotearoa's most prestigious art prize, The Walters. Last year they won the $25,000 Rydal Art Prize, awarded biannually to a recent body of work considered by a jury to have made an important contribution to Aotearoa painting. They were also awarded one of the country’s most coveted residencies at McCahon House in the Waitakere. 

The $50,000 Walters Prize - which is now awarded every three years - is being decided between Connors, Juliet Carpenter, Brett Graham and Ana Iti. A selection of the finalists work is currently being exhibited at Auckland Art Gallery, which hosts the prize. 

Connors’ was nominated for two exhibitions with their dealer Robert Heald gallery, but the Walters Prize exhibition features one particular ambitious work. 

Land of Doubts & Shadows, is an installation featuring three double-sided painted panels on swivels, recalling European mediaeval altarpiece paintings. There’s a contemporary story to piece together, like an adventure, loosely based on a tale from Irish mythology called ‘The Tragedy of the Children of Tuireann’. An approach, says Connors, inspired by connecting with his Pakeha identity through looking back to his Irish ancestry.  

As landscape painting and storytelling, the work is distinctive in many different ways. 

A group of men and boys appear to be at both violent play and discovery in a stony pit, the grass of the landscape above them near the top of the picture frame. The world turns topsy turvy. Like a storybook there’s a series of scenes to interpret: a boat being rowed with a sheep in the back, say, or a smiling pig beside a half eaten apple. Aotearoa's landscape painting tradition, art history and male violence are all shifted into new charged territory, 

Then there is Connors’ use of unusual art media, with its own rich histories to add further meanings. Connors paints with egg tempera, which involves a painstaking layering approach. Egg tempera was a common method of painting until the 16th century, when it was superseded by oil painting.  

Then in Land of Doubts & Shadows is his use on the frames of what looks like stones but are in fact Scagliola, a technique of creating fake marble. It was an architectural tradition that coincided in the Renaissance with the use of egg tempera. 

“It’s kind of amazing to work with,”  Connors explains. “It’s like you’re making pasta or something,”

“You make these piles of plaster and then you pour in your glue and pigment and you then knead it. And then, to get certain patterns like rocks, you emulate the geological processes that would produce that rock.” 

Owen Connors joins  Culture 101 to explain more.

The Walters Prize exhibition is on until 20 October. The award will be made on the 27th of September by a visiting judge, Berlin based Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung from Cameroon.