Kōrero: Painting

William (Bill) Sutton claimed that he 'had no desire to create or recognise national totems'; but his paintings of the Canterbury landscape have certainly been seen as expressing regional, if not national, characteristics. Like many of the Christchurch painters of the 1930s and 1940s, Sutton often placed buildings or other constructed objects against the landscape. Here, we see the mortuary chapel and gravestones from Christchurch's Barbadoes Street Cemetery placed in a Canterbury rural scene. The north-west sky fills the background and the wind rustles the long dry grass.