Courtesy: the artist and Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland.

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

Sanderson present the exhibition Verdant, an exhibition of new works by contemporary painter Katherine Throne.

The tenacity, vigour and beauty of nature has been motivating Throne’s practice for several years. The energy the artist feels within a wild garden she translates into large gestural marks and thick layers of impasto oil paint. Throne manipulates paint in a way that mimics light refracting in nature, transporting the viewer into another world. We feel the lavishness of petals, the friction of stems, and the deepness of long shadows. One can’t help but be drawn into each scene; to be touched by the resonating energy found within.

Throne created this collection of paintings while growing her own garden. As the tangible garden grew alongside the pictorial, the boundaries between each blurred into one creation. At the heart of both was the artist’s desire to acknowledge the raw beauty and the tenacious spirit of the flower.

“Gardens have a hold on me. Especially the wild ones where nature rambles in delightful disorder. For years I’ve voyeuristically lived in other people’s gardens, taking fragments of that exuberance home and then translating it into my language of paint. Finally, last summer, I planted my own garden.

In September 2022, the earth of the garden was bare. The glacial Otago soil was devoid of nutrients; rock hard and compacted after years of impact from diggers and builders. Snow had turned it solid and freezing wind had stripped it of moisture.

Tentatively I chipped away at the crust and eased my seedlings into the dry earth beds. Gradually small shoots grew, and flowers appeared. The sun bore down, the wind blew hard and rain refused to fall. The earth turned to dust but still the garden grew. Brown became green, colours deepened and leaves swelled.

By February, the ‘show’ was in full swing. Stems arched under the weight of frothy petals, bees thronged through waving stalks and seed heads lurched with the weight of balancing birds. In the evenings, the slanting sun threw back a golden light as it tipped behind the pine trees, making the garden glow.

Without fail, every time I watched I marvelled. Nature is so clever. So persistent. How, in five months, had she done this? From barren earth, a verdant swathe of glorious colour had stubbornly persisted to flourish.” – Katherine Throne, 2023.

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