When asked if I would write an essay about Toby Raine’s approach to painting for Art New Zealand, Issue 189 Autumn 2024, I was thrilled and delighted as it was Toby who painted a portrait of myself as Mrs New Zealand Elegance 1986. Below is a small extract from the full essay available from Art New Zealand: https://art-newzealand.com/iss...

'Raine has invented his own way of seeing the world like a reflective experience of his own innerworld and reality. He dances and flirts with a Kristevian vertigo, playfully accepting and rejecting, beauty and the abject, distorting his subjects. If an artwork can generate an emotional response, then Raine vindicates this notion, enabling us to appreciate his paintings on an even deeper level than just the wild-at-heart, informal, playful, and chaotic yet ordered three-dimensional surfaces that he creates during the process of exploration.

His vision is expressed in heavily applied layers that draw the inclination to break the tapu of touch, the desire to run fingers over the intimacies of the once gooey paint, to connect with the forbidden in The Embrace of Josh Tillman (Father John Misty) and Elizabeth Woodridge Grant (Lana Del Ray). Only to be warded off by that challenge in the daub of the eye, or the epiphany captured in the similar daubs of Father John Misty with Dead Flowers, on Acid, Realising he’s Josh Tillman. The works are transitional in characterisation and creation. Raine himself is playfully caught on canvas morphing into another character in When the Artist becomes Baron Yeti he runs with the Bulls naked, with Roses. There is a sense of the irreverent through humouring ourselves as a species, taking ourselves too seriously in all his work, and the play of deliberate deception is one aspect of this in The Conscience of Lana Del Ray (Lana Del Ray is not her Real Name!).

The extravagant impasto of Raine’s curated canvases, which deliver an energetic, action-painted intensity to his subjects, makes no secret of an artist searching for something vital, magical, and unique. Maybe it is hidden, just beneath the layers of paint, like bones waiting to be excavated – an insurgence of the invisible coming into the field of view.

Maybe it is his chosen, iconic figure waiting to escape to the surface, to be seen like the character they portray, their alter ego larger than life. Or perhaps during the process of building up, then scraping away, Raine is searching for his own soul, his spiritual vision
above his optical vision—after all, the act of painting is his world and his mode of existence. As Albert Schweitzer said, ‘The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.’ For Raine, it is a case of paint or perish. Creating work is like a prescription for
anti-depressive living. Animating his practice has also been the continuous challenge of reaching a balance and congruence between abstraction, figuration and expressionist painting. His latest works demonstrate that this is something that he achieves in a dynamic manner with swirling, hypnotic pleasure.

I have never watched Raine in the act of painting, but it is not hard to imagine. A man in a clean white singlet and blue jeans. A hat, because there always has to be a hat on such a good crop of hair. After the compulsory stretching and setting of the substrate and
the careful selection of oils, he steps into the arena. He stands before the nothingness of a white canvas as if it were a bull, and he is the matador. We expect action, but it is too soon. He blurs himself, pulling back from the surface of initial thoughts to transcend the same realms of contemplation that his subjects do until the epiphany strikes.'