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Jean Stewart: Sitting with the Trees
January 16 @ 10:00 am – February 15 @ 4:00 pm
Jean Stewart: Sitting with the Trees
16 January – 15 February 2026
DEPOT 3 Vic Road
3 Victoria Road, Devonport
Exhibition Opening & Artist Talk:
Friday 16 January, 6-7:30pm
Artwork: Jean Stewart, Even in the quiet place it feels like war, Oil on canvas, 2025. Photo by Ralph Brown.
About the Exhibition
This grouping of paintings brings together three separate threads of work, all situated in the wild pine and native bush that populates the land near where Jean lives. Puponga point in the Waitakere ranges, now covered in old pine trees, the remnants of a rumoured work for the dole scheme tree planting in the 80’s. Unmonitored trees crash to the ground in their own time while amongst the carnage of splintered wood new clumps of native bush or weeds emerge. There is a left-alone forgottenness about this situation that Jean likes and finds the quietness appropriate ground for the uneasiness of the current world to permeate the paintings with worried whispers.
All paintings are painted outside with an effort to capture what is being seen, while in some way also echoing wider concerns. The 200 days of rain series were painted leading up to and over the period of the Auckland floods and are therefore paintings of the rain and a certain time. The two large tree paintings echo a world at war and a sense of loss. The most recent series aims to capture the forgotten, overlooked and subdued parts of the landscape, capturing mood through colour and brush mark.
Artworks
Click here to view the exhibition collection.
About the Artist
Jean Stewart is a painter and senior arts educator based in West Auckland, holding a Masters in Design and Painting. Over the past 20 years, her practice has explored storytelling through colour, mark-making and memory.
Jean’s work often extends beyond the canvas, connecting communities through site-specific projects. Her recent work includes the Whau Local Hero portrait series, Workers in dirt community garden series and Departure lounge, a series of works based on the final months of the Kings Arms Tavern.
Q+A with Jean
In what ways does working outdoors among wild pine and native bush shape the way you observe the landscape and translate those impressions onto the canvas?
“Working outside observing in real time the view being painted means that you are open and influenced by all the senses at once. The effort is to capture the mood of all these sensations combined so the result is a visual record that also speaks to the way things feel the temperature, the noise or quiet, the movement of light. I find it the best way to really paint in a concentrated way. It feels like all the information is there; you just have to record it. The absorbed experience creates a kind of concentrated effort that either stands up to what is being observed or doesn’t. The answers seem more straight forward outside in the sunlight of the subject.“
What draws you toward the “forgotten” or overlooked parts of the landscape, and how do you use colour and brushwork to convey the subtle uneasiness you sense in those spaces?
“I am interested in capturing moods, making you feel a certain way when you look at a painting. The idea isn’t of glorifying beauty but more a disquieting seeing things as they are seen, kind of approach. I am drawn to the forgotten spaces in landscape and the collusion between pine and native bush growing on Puponga, as it holds so many contradictions, on one hand I find the un- orchestrated life, the absence of human ordering, reassuring. I like thinking that all the living things here don’t need people or me, they can work things out themselves. On the other hand the absence of human ordering is also unnerving particularly in a space where humans have interfered and then left – planting out all the pines and then leaving them to fall down like an abandoned house. It’s kind of strange. There is also a violence to the landscape here, huge tree’s that tower above and threaten to fall when the wind gets up and then the carnage of fallen ones everywhere as well.
So the uneasiness is in the subject already. In the undercover series I was really aiming to capture a looked over kind of non descriptness. The colour in this series was saturated by the browns of the tonal underpainting with the tonal range of the colours kept small so less highlights, but a broad variety of greyed down colour to aid the overall effect. Marks were made first in a staccato way with lots of small distinct marks describing the whole. Then painted over with smaller wispier marks to blend the edges and soften the whole effect. At this point I was thinking of the Renior painting I had recently seen at the Auckland Art Gallery and the lightness of his marks, though in my painting it was describing a dimness rather than a lightness.
In the large tree works there is more space and emptiness in areas which works to speak to the uneasiness the undescribed or the spaces between known things. In these larger works and their location the ideas and the view are more lofty. The colours are painted directly onto the gessoed surface so that the light can bounce in and off the gesso and back out through the paint creating a lighter more airy effect. There was also the chance in these larger works for the light to play a more interactive role, in situ the moving sunlight would play across the canvas and suggest another melody different then the view in front of the canvas. The evidence of this play is captured in the colours and marks also.
In the rain paintings the view is seen more from a distance and the effort is to capture the mood and colours of the rain. The marks are varied as each tree or sky demands. Blues and Purples are used to add distance or air between things to push the background into the distance and also to create a feeling of wetness across the whole picture plane.“
