Provenance:
Private Collection, Auckland
Acquired in 1972 by present owner

Previously unseen by the public, this compelling work casts an insightful lens on the formal and academic philosophies which drove Hotere's practice in the 1970s. The word Pine is a testament to longing, quite literally, to pining for someone or something. But on perceiving the blue-grey of the pine tree in this work it also becomes so much more: a bruise, a documentation of personal and ecological trauma. To recall the tenderness of bruises, of violence, of flesh that needs to heal is to experience this painting. It is impressionistic in its treatment of colour and although the work is of and about nature, it carries the weight of words and the human spirit beneath its surface.

The tree trunk which is rooted in the canvas and rises through the upper two sections of the work offers both gravity and solidarity. We are reminded especially of McCahon's Titirangi series and those gloriously faceted Kauri paintings of two decades earlier. Hotere has replicated the clarity of brushwork and light of these works and added to it a darkness - a darkness which implies the black of his canvases, and from which facets of light shine out.