The Weight of the World: Dick Frizzell

Dick Frizzell, July 2025

Dick Frizzell is one of Aotearoa’s most widely known and celebrated painters. His works traverse genres with an assured confidence and skill. In this major new exhibition, Frizzell returns to the historically rich tradition of landscape painting, embedded as ever with his playful and idiosyncratic sensibilities.

Frizzell’s landscapes bring into focus fragments of the New Zealand landscape that feel deeply familiar. They are down-to-earth, up-the-road, intentionally unspectacular scenes.  Poplar trees emerge from the end of a gravel path, a ladies toilet stands on a lean, a boarded-up fishing hut sits proudly in the sunshine, while a shadowed tree foregrounds a rolling mist.  In Frizzell’s hands, the quotidian is front-and-centre spectacular. Frizzell elevates the everyday, inspired by an everlasting optimism. “My landscapes occupy a special place in my affections because they define, more than any other of my endeavours, the most solid manifestation of my philosophy. Both the subjects and their manner of representation are chosen to emphasise my eternally optimistic faith in the physical universe that I believe we are ultimately destined to define. I hope… through my piles of hills, stumps, trees and land… to literally convey ‘the gravity of the situation’.” [2]

Traversing vast terrains and local, side-of-the-road scenes, Frizzell has developed a uniquely Frizzellean visual language shaped by his particular approach to looking. His compositions usually involve “a high horizon, lots of pattern, generally folding to a central motif, a kind of knuckle, like a road or a river.” Frizzell continues, “Of course, as a painter, part of my job is looking for pattern in the world, making order out of the chaos.” [3] There is an immediacy to Frizzell’s choice in subject matter, a simplicity, which is part of what makes his work so relatable and recognisable. “I get something in my head and I can’t wait to get it out so I can have a look at it… Moving faster than the speed of thought, I call it.  If I have to think about it then something’s not working”  [4]

Simplicity, however, does not mean that the works are not serious in nature. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand under Frizzell’s brush.  In one of the major works in the exhibition, Milling Whakaangiangi (2025), a large plantation of pine is a familiar sight for anyone who has driven through New Zealand’s landscapes. Fast-growing pinus radiata has been a pillar of Aotearoa’s forestry industry. Encouraged by carbon credit incentives, pine forests have been planted heavily but are contentious when considering long term impacts on climate, biodiversity and soil degradation. Frizzell’s scene is matter-of-fact, compelled by composition.  His interest lies in line and form, the trees rolling back into a jagged, misty mountain range however the sentiment of awe weighed with reality rings particularly true standing before this work.

Over 35 years ago, Frizzell was part of Gow Langsford Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, which took place in a converted petrol station in 1987. Represented by the gallery ever since, Frizzell is now presenting his first exhibition in our flagship Onehunga premises with paintings that are larger than ever – a “blockbuster” landscape show, as he describes it. [5] The Weight of the World sees Frizzell wielding decades of experience, owing much of his long-standing artistic success to his ability to change, adapt and reinvent himself. The task of the painter faced with a blank canvas can feel like the Greek Titan Atlas, condemned to hold up the sky for eternity.  This series of paintings, however, bring us right back to earth. Frizzell’s Aotearoa is real – tree stumps, trimmed hedges, bent pine and all. It is tangible, relatable, and whole-heartedly Frizzellean.

[1] Email correspondence with Dick Frizzell, July 2025
[2] Frizzell, Dick, Exhibition text, Landscapes: Dick Frizzell and Karl Maughan, 2018, Gow Langsford Lorne Street
[3] Frizzell, Dick, Me, According To The History Of Art, Massey University Press, 2020, Auckland, p.295
[4] Ibid, p.17
[5] Email correspondence with Dick Frizzell, July 2025