A painting can take you to many places. It can take you around the world, or it can take you around the country, city or neighbourhood you live in. It can also transport you back into the distant past of myths, legends and ancient history - or it can take you way into the future. Since Maori first drew moa and mythical birds on cave walls, artists in Aotearoa New Zealand have provided an imaginative, lively account of the lives locals have been leading, the dreams they've been dreaming and the stories they've been telling. Alongside works painted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book features art by contemporary painters and printmakers, all of them seasoned travellers across time and space. Angels, rugby players, whales, kiwi and canoes, moa and mountains, the bush and the beaches all play starring roles in this bird's-eye view of New Zealand painting. "Back and Beyond" is alive with real and imagined encounters, with mysteries and discoveries, and with many of the paintings that have, over the past few hundred years, broadened the horizons of the citizens, young and old, of the shaky isles.

Accolades

NZ Post Award Winner 2009 - Non-Fiction category

Author Biography

Gregory O'Brien is a writer, teacher, painter and curator at Wellington's City Gallery. He has written many books of poetry, fiction, essays and commentary. His recent books include A Nest of Singing Birds: 100 Years of the School Journal; the book- length essay, News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore; and his introduction to art Welcome to the South Seas (AUP), a companion to Back and Beyond, which won the 2005 Non-Fiction Prize at the NZ Post Book Awards for Children and Young People and the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction.