Artist's Background
Harold Coop is a New Zealand
artist, working in the field of contemporary
landscape and abstacted landscape. He has had
numerous one-man exhibitions throughout New Zealand,
and has also exhibited in France, England, and
Australia. He exhibited first with the Auckland
Society of Arts in 1959. He was later a judge
for the Bledisloe Medal in landscape painting,
awarded by that Society. He made his initial
mark as a master of watercolour, but is equally
at home with oil or acrylic. His book of commentary
and landscape paintings "A Vision of New
Zealand"
is to be released by Saint Publishing Auckland
(www.saintpublish.co.nz) in September 2006.
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Many New Zealand specialist
print galleries have displayed his work which has
been used by Auckland International
Airport and for a Readers' Digest cover. His work is in
possession of many private collections in New Zealand,
Australia, United Kingdom and USA and Europe. Two
paintings hang in the Governor General's Auckland Residence,
Government House, several in Paris, and five in Venice.
His fifteen solo exhibitions are listed below.
His largest work is a six-metre
long, illuminated mural made of plastics, with the brilliant
colour intensity of stained glass, at the entrance to the
School of Medicine, University of Auckland.
For three years calendars containing
twelve of his landscape reproductions have been released
nationally in New Zealand.
Commission for gilded crest for
the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists
He has been published in The Australian
Artist, June 1999, and a number of his works have been
used by architects and interior designers.
Limestone Cliffs, Rangitikei
Acrylic with Gold and Copper
76 x 140 cm
(This painting was a
finalist in the International Artist Magazine Competition,
August 2002)
His work radiates a love of the diverse
unspoiled landscape and bright clear light, with which
New Zealanders find themselves surrounded. His love
of colour and his experimentation with it have stimulated
an exploration of European landscape in his frequent
visits to his family there. His paintings express the
differing and often transient interaction of land forms,
colour, and human contact.
Extensive visits to Europe exposed
him to the use of golds in the work of Gustav Klimt,
Russian icons, illuminated manuscripts, and also to
the work of European colourists. He has now combined
these influences with his decades of water colour expertise.
New acrylic media allowing use of washes, as in the
adventurous American watercolour school, and also metallic
pigments, have enhanced his creation of precious icons
of the New Zealand experience, midway between landscape
and abstraction.
Northland Abstract
Landscape II
Acrylic with metallic pigments
78x101cm
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Sailing Series
II
Acrylic with metallic pigments
61x101cm
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Watercolour
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Oil
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Exhibitions:
1961 Westport Arts Council
1961 Moller's Art Gallery, Auckland
1973 Osborne Gallery, Auckland.
1977 Barry Lett Gallery, Auckland
1978 Aquarius Gallery, Hamilton
1983 Gallery Pacific, Auckland
1983 Antipodes Gallery, Wellington
1979, 1981,1982,1984,1993,1996,
1998, 2000 John Leech Gallery, Auckland
Group Exhibitions:
Pacific and Portfolio Galleries
1998 Major Auckland Artists Exhibition,
Pumphouse Gallery, Takapuna
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Acrylic
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"A vineyard
is the miracle of water into wine, in slow motion"-
St Augustine.
(Click to enlarge)
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