PROVENANCE

Collection of the late Eric & Kathy Hertz

REFERENCE From the age of seven Pankhurst was winning school holiday art awards, then cameras, books - even a family holiday to Hawaii, culminating with his winning the 1974 Benson and Hedges National Art Award.

International Judge James W. Foster described Pankhurst's work at that time as a tour de force in its immaculate technique, exquisitely detailed composition, eerie colour and compelling sense of time and place.

I have always been a realist/surrealist. My still-life paintings with plant roots showing the passage of time consumed me through the 1970s and 80s, and the last paintings in that series were exhibited at London's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2001.

While Pankhurst was painting a work titled Shifting Sands, which featured a mantelpiece in the sand dunes, it inspired him to paint his first maori painting, About Time, 2006. This and the subsequent maori paintings Transition, 2007 and The Last Stand, 2007 have the meditative inner spirit he sought.

The carver Te Umanui carved Tiki in the early 1800's with stone and greenstone tools. A famous Ngati Whakaue leader. ALVIN PANKHURST