Paint shots: The land and water loving art of Sally Hope.

Opening Wednesday 5.30, 9 June, Quiqcorp Art Space, 155 High St, Christchurch.

In this age of instant, digital art Sally Hope practises a traditional painting craft. One of her early memories is playing beside her Grandmother Esther Hope who was setting up her easel in the tussocks in the middle of nowhere on the Grampians Station in the Mackenzie Country. Sally recalls her sitting under a big black umbrella with a wide brimmed sunhat with a palette in one hand and brush in the other, confidently painting Mount Cook, the Tekapo River or Greys Creek. Born in Geraldine she was a wonderful draughtswoman who had studied at the Slade Art School in England and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Esther, among her other great achievements is renowned as the designer of the Tekapo Church, which is of course now one  of the many icons of the Mackenzie Country. The Hope kids were always hanging around and taking in the art of Granny and her friends like Olivia Spenser Bower who painted and chewed cigars at the same time.

Sally left school and went to a graphic arts course at Christchurch Polytechnic where she was exposed to the consummate draughtsmanship of Barry Cleavin. Five years of art education was to follow in England, where she graduated with a BA in painting from the Camberwell School of Art in London.

Sally, as well as being an accomplished portrait painter whose commissions includes Rob Muldoon and Aussie dress designer Linda Jackson, paints plein air in the tradition of Grandmother and the impressionists. Like her grandmother Sally loves nothing more than to spontaneously capture the light and colour of Aoraki from Grampians Station, the family run. Sally is passionate about water and after a week in the studio on commissioned portraits her favourite Sunday painting jaunt is to go to the Waimakariri River and capture the flow and light of the water.

These intimate, small scale, painterly reflections of water and mountains are what this exhibition is about.