Creative Connections

Naomi Azoulay is a middle-eastern-born, Auckland-based award-winning portrait and mixed media collage artist.  Naomi creates captivating, bold, intimate and vibrant mixed media collages and oil paintings. She aims to tackle social justice issues, decolonise the art space and expand the definition of beauty. She is passionate about exploring the female gaze and probing traditional gender roles. Wit...

Oliver Cain is an English born artist who emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2013. His work covers a wide range of topics and materials and takes many forms from ceramics to sculpture to installation and painting. His artworks push the boundaries between conceptualism and post-pop art.  As a proud member of the queer community, Oliver uses his work to examine, question and criticise the relation...

Joshua Davison is a contemporary artist from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, with a diverse body of work in both realism portraiture and sculptural painting. Josh is a self taught artist who has developed personal techniques which he uses throughout his impasto and sculptural paintings such as a methodical palette knife technique, layering MDF like a topographical map, making moulds and piping modelling...

Tanja McMillan, a.k.a Misery, is an Australian born painter, sculptor, photographer and mural artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her creative reach is extensive, ranging from highly crafted fine art paintings and wall art to animation and fashion. Tanja’s work, under the name Misery, graces streets and galleries in Aotearoa NZ and around the world. She has exhibited in Auckland, Wellington...

Sierra Roberts is an artist from Wānaka, in the South Island of New Zealand. She creates bold, statement portraits exploring perceptions of beauty and the female experience.  Her travels through Australia, Asia, South, Central and Northern America have strongly influenced her art, inspiring her to share and celebrate the beauty she has experienced, challenging her work beyond traditional portraitu...

Angela Rowe is an artist, writer, curator and mentor based in Whangārei. Her creative practice includes storytelling across performance, installation, photography, drawing, and textile works.  Angela is interested in the future of arts in Aotearoa and how to create a more sustainable arts industry. She founded Creative Practice , a collaborative mentoring program designed to empower artists and cr...

Jamie Chapman is a painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. He was born in the United Kingdom and immigrated with his family to New Zealand when he was 2 years old, settling and growing up in Whangarei. Jamie talks about his figurative oil paintings and how they have evolved over the years into different 'series' of portrait works. He shares how he likes to "shift it up" and...

Sofia Athineou is a full-time artist of Greek heritage, based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her practice is mainly in glass, a medium she sees as having many sensual and optical qualities.  Surrounded by the dramatic bush of Auckland’s west coast Waitakere Ranges, it’s easy to see the inspiration behind Sofia Athineou’s incredible glass sculptures. These pieces represent vitality through light, tex...

Andrew J. Steel is a New Zealand contemporary artist with a passion for story telling. Over his career he has worked across the mediums of public art, private interiors, fine artwork, letterpress, land, body, photography and digital works.  "An artists role is to live a remarkable life and report back on it in their work." says Andrew. Andrew makes art to learn more about people & th...

Tanya Blong was our very first guest on the Creative Matters podcast and lucky for us she is back 96 episodes later to talk about her artistic journey since March 2021 and how her practice has developed and evolved.  In this episode we start by talking about the Creative Matters podcast, how it has evolved over the last 2 and a half years since I first interviewed Tanya in episode 1 and my goals f...

Julie and Michael Freeman are award winning hyperrealistic pastel artists living in Auckland NZ. ​Julie is currently creating work with the intent of realism beyond the photograph. Her subject matter is varied, from coastal and nautical to the natural fauna and flora of NZ, but if asked she would say she has an affinity with painting animals. Michael’s subjects range from his current series of sti...

Toby Raine is a contemporary artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. He has a distinctive approach to his work, moving large quantities of oil paint across the surface of a canvas with confident strokes, creating expressive, emotive, gestural paintings. Toby spent eleven years studying at Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland, beginning in 2006 when he was 23-years-old. Over the next decade he w...

Matthew Browne is an abstract painter living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Born in London UK, he relocated to New Zealand in 1991.  Matthew's striking geometric paintings feature sharp lines with bold, experimental colour palettes. His process starts in exploring formal relationships in colour and form and develops greater complexity as the work progresses. He has been making and showing paint...

Fleur Woods is a contemporary fibre artist based in the beautiful rural village of Upper Moutere (near Nelson, New Zealand) She is surrounded by vineyards, hop farms, orchards and country gardens - it makes sense  that her work is largely inspired by nature.  Fleur describes her style of her work as contemporary s titched paintings. Coming to stitch as a mixed media artist she has taught herself a...

Abstract artist Evan Woodruffe lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He is a well known, much loved figure in the NZ art world. Evan is an artist with many threads to his practice. Most of his time is spent making work for exhibitions, projects, and commissions. He's also the “product specialist” for Gordon Harris, running workshops and writing editorial for their art stores. He is one of six Gl...

Sean Beldon is a South African born, Auckland-based artist best known for his large New Zealand landscape paintings. His style is mostly painterly with a modernist feel. For more than a decade, Sean has been photographing and painting landscapes from the far north to the deep south of Aotearoa. He finds his inspiration on road trips throughout the country and only paints places he has been. Even t...

Jasmine Kroeze is an an artist and textile designer living in Papamoa near Mt Maunganui. With a  background in the fashion and textile design industry, Jasmine fell into the art world through painting large scale murals as a passion project and now she applies the same creative process to her original paintings and digital artworks.  Jaz enjoys working with commercial clients and interior and prod...

Elliot Love is a contemporary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. His hyper realistic paintingsdepict cars from the 80's and 90's era set within a city's still and lifeless urban environment. Elliot works in oil on canvas, often on an unusually small scale. Many of the cars he paints are reaching the end of their lifespan - several of the cars he has painted no longer exist....

Linda Va’aelua is a full time visual artist and designer of Samoan Scottish heritage. She grew up in the West Auckland suburb of Te Atatu South and is based in Tāmaki Makaurau,  Auckland. Linda straddles the worlds of digital graphic design and fine arts. Her aim is always to bring unique perspectives to the creative landscape. Her recent work explores her identity and mixed heritage through abstr...

Frankie Meaden is a textile artist and painter from Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. She makes giant embroidery artwork from recycled materials. Frankie’s art is almost always botanical, with her large-scale sculptural pieces challenging the scale at which embroidery is usually seen. Frankie tells the story of the rich biodiversity of our world using colourful rope and recycled street banners in a way t...

Mandy Rodger is a contemporary abstract artist based in Auckland, New Zealand. Mandy's first career was in law and in 2014 she began studying painting and drawing at Browne School of Art. Since 2017 her art practice has been her main focus and she hasn't looked back..  Mandy's abstract paintings are characterised by fluid moves and sweeping energy flows made up of spontaneous dynami...

Matt Payne is a landscape painter living on the North Shore, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.  Much of Matt’s work is inspired by a love of New Zealand’s landscapes and coastlines, which is reflected in dramatic compositions and depicted with vivid colour and extraordinary attention to detail.  He has a fascination with the relationship between colour, light and form and how these are perceived by the...

Sam Mitchell is a visual artist based in the north west of Auckland, well known for her artworks painted in acrylic on perspex in reverse and watercolour paintings.  A sassy and subversive bricolage of rescued materials, painting media and eccentric imagery are utilised by Sam to explore the potency of pictures. This is a fascinating look into an amazing artist's life and work. There are lots...

Gavin Chai, born in 1997 in Malaysia, is a figurative painter and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.  He specialises in the traditional technique of oil painting on wooden panels, linen and canvases and paints the world through a subtle introverted gaze. He captures everyday contemporary experiences through his careful composition and clever treatment of colour, light, and shadow. His world...

Marcus Hipa is a Niuean artist born and raised in Alofi, Niue Island, currently living in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa NZ. Drawing, painting and carving are some of the mediums he utilises to explore and share insights of his people's history and culture. Marcus moved to Aotearoa New Zealand at age 17, attending the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, completing both his bach...