April 9, 2009
WA Sutton was a regionalist painter in the 1950's--1970s whose enduring theme has been an intense observation of the Canterbury landscape in the South Island of New Zealand
WA Sutton, Pastoral, oil on canvas, 1959
The works for which Sutton is best known include his ‘Church’ series painted in Canterbury in the 1940s and 1950s. In these works Sutton alludes to human inhabitation, colonisation, and mortality in the depiction of empty church buildings and silent graveyards.
He went increasingly abstract in latter years:
William A. Sutton, Threshold VIII, 1973
And:
William A Sutton, Plantation Series XVII, 1988
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