Come running sea _{by Alessia Belsito-Riera}

For the past 15 years, most of Gregory O’Brien’s work has had a strong oceanic feeling to it. Whether painting places around Wellington or faraway nooks in Niue, the Kiwi artist again finds himself diving into the sea in his latest exhibition At the Washaway, moored at Bowen Galleries from the 29^th of April until the 17^th of May.

What is the intention of At the Washaway?

The paintings focus on two very different coastal locations: Wellington Harbour (beside which I live) and the Pacific island of Niue, which I visited in 2015 and 2022.

The Wellington paintings incorporate the Days Bay Wharf and the now demolished warehouses and jetties at Shelly Bay. The Niue paintings include elements from Alofi and Avatele.

The Washaway is the name of a beachfront bar that used to function just above the high-tide mark at Avatele. It was famous for having an honesty-based bar system. Basically, you wrote what you were drinking in an exercise book, and at the end of the day or evening, you would ask around and find who, among those in the bar, you should pay the money to. It seemed a very virtuous, honest, open-hearted place, but also high-spirited and (I imagine) from time to time given over to the occasional excess.

I hope the paintings capture both a state of mind and a sense of the physical locations themselves. These waterside locations have always been an inspiration for me as a writer and a painter... One gets a sense of arrival and departure, the beginning of life and its end. The freighters and other vessels hint at journeys/voyages, and also the exchange of goods.

The exhibition also includes a number of etchings made in collaboration with the Niue-based artist John Pule. Two of these etchings are meditations on the sinking of the Manawanui off the coast of Samoa late last year. They capture something of the strangeness (and a sense of dread) associated with the current predicament in which nature is rendered vulnerable.

How would you describe your style?

The paintings are, I hope, lyrical, poetic, stylised, figurative (to a point), but also hopefully responsive to the rhythms and abstract energies and symmetries of the places that inspired them. I like to think that the paintings contain various untethered narratives. Perhaps they are more like poems than stories. The meaning tends to be elusive and something that emerges slowly and changes with time. Like good poetry.

What do you hope visitors take away from the exhibition?

I hope people get a sense of the imaginative potential of our Pacific environment, as well as a sense of its beauty and power – and also its vulnerability. The paintings explore the interface between humanity and the wider oceanic realm. As humans, we need to be more holistic and selfless in our thinking. I am still learning how to embrace with my whole being this Pacific realm we live in.