PROVENANCE Private Collection, Hamilton

Robert Ellis was born in Northampton, England 1929. He studied at Northampton School of Art from 1944 to 1947 and attended the Royal College of Art, London from 1949 to 1952. He came to New Zealand in 1957 to take up a position as Senior Lecturer at Elam School of Fine Arts where he taught from 1957 to 1994.

Before coming to New Zealand Ellis had served in the Royal Air Force as an aerial photographer. This helped forge his individual manner of painting. He evolved an imagery of symbols of cities seen from the air. Ellis did not paint one particular city but generalisations of the relationship between a city and its surroundings. These were created with energy, complexity of colour and a remarkable handling of paint.

Ellis' expressionist manner of impasto and layered, slashed surfaces are full of vigour and colour. His works were created at a time when motorways were being established and the way they cut through the cityscape was used as a dynamic element in the works.

While Robert Ellis concentrated on motorways and city life during the 1960s, by the 1970s and 1980s his focus shifted to the rural community of his family's marae at Te Rawhiti in the Bay of Islands. The extraordinary marae with unusual pillars for its porch were captured in a series of works titled Te Rawhiti. Te Rawhiti IV is part of a comprehensive series of paintings that make observations about two cultural threads, Māori and Pākehā, from a personal as well as a social perspective. In 1984 Ellis stated: These buildings are of some importance in my life and I was involved in the rehabilitation of this marae over a 20-year period. And I literally spent every vacation for 20 years working on this building and this fact is reflected in my paintings.