John Bevan Ford; NZ Maori artist (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
New Zealand Maori artist building bridges between cultures
http://www.warwickhenderson.co.nz/westmere2003/images/25BevanFord.jpg
http://www.thepencilgallery.co.nz/artists/j_bevan_ford.htm
Dale Idiens
Friday October 14, 2005
The Guardian
One of New Zealand's best known Maori artists, John Bevan
Ford, who has died of cancer aged 75, was acknowledged as an
outstanding traditional carver as well as a leading figure
in contemporary Maori art. His large-scale sculptures and
distinctive paintings achieved international recognition.
John's artistic range was extraordinary. His skills as a
traditional wood carver are evidenced in the full-sized
Maori canoe in the Taranaki museum, New Plymouth, and a
Maori meeting house at Wairarapa, on the east coast of North
Island. There are stone and wood sculptures, which to
varying degrees blend traditional iconography with
contemporary forms, and designs for wool rugs, one of which
was presented to President Bill Clinton.
But it is for his paintings that John is best known,
especially outside New Zealand. He worked in a highly
detailed linear style which was entirely his own, using
coloured inks and liquid acrylic often combined with
coloured pastels and graphite. He was influenced by
traditional carving patterns, in particular by the form and
structure of the hand-woven Maori flax cloak. For John, the
cloak became an all-encompassing metaphor for landscape,
migration and mythology.
Highly responsive both to nature and to symbolism, he
readily absorbed motifs and symbols from other cultures.
Much of his art was concerned with making bridges: between
the past and the present, between different cultures and
peoples.
Born in Christchurch, the son of a mother of Maori and Welsh
descent and a father of English and German descent, John
moved with his family to Wellington in his teens. Interested
from childhood in drawing, he attended Wellington Teachers
College and, after completing a two-year course, won a third
year of specialist art training at Dunedin College, as part
of a programme to encourage Maori art in New Zealand
schools.
John's commitment to education continued with a move to
Hamilton Teacher Training College as an art lecturer in the
early 1970s, and in the mid-1970s to the Maori studies
department at Massey University, Palmerston North, where he
introduced a programme in Maori visual arts.
In 1987, he took early retirement to work full-time as an
artist from his home in Manawatu, with the help of his
second wife, Anne, as his business partner. He undertook a
series of major public sculpture commissions for Palmerston
North city council and Massey University, while his
paintings were shown in more than 20 solo exhibitions all
over the world. In 1990, he became the first New Zealand
artist to present his work at a series of guest lectures at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1998, he was
artist in residence at the British Museum's Maori Art
exhibition.
In recent years, he was asked to create major sculptures for
the cities of Chang- chun and Beijing. His work is
represented in the British Museum collection, and in
galleries in Germany, Holland and Australia, as well as New
Zealand.
He is survived by his wife and the five children of his
first marriage.
Julie Adams writes: I experienced at first hand John Bevan
Ford's willingness to engage in cross-cultural dialogue when
I visited him as a PhD student in his garden studio in New
Zealand. He summed up his approach to his work: "That which
transcends culture is the best art of all." For most of his
life, he dedicated himself to art education; he was one of
13 young Maori teachers recruited in the 1950s by the New
Zealand education department to introduce the idea that
Maori culture had something of value to offer to the country
as a whole.
Much of his art was inspired by his mixed Maori and European
heritage. His British ancestors established a rope-making
business in the 19th century, utilising the vast quantities
of flax found along the south-western coast of New Zealand's
North Island. His Maori ancestors had a long tradition of
using the flax to produce beautiful cloaks. In many of
Ford's paintings, he used delicate coloured ink lines to
depict such cloaks - the lines symbolising the threads of
flax that weave the two sides of his history together.
He was also interested in the wider connections between
peoples and cultures. In 2003, he contributed to an on-line
exhibition organised by the Chinese authorities to mark the
Sars crisis; his painting, Belief in Renewal, contains
Chinese and Maori imagery, including a cloak as its
centrepiece, and reflects the universal nature of human
suffering and the ability to overcome adversity.
· John Bevan Ford, artist, born 1930; died September 16 2005