Séraphine Pick

Séraphine Pick (born 23 May 1964, in Kawakawa, New Zealand) is a New Zealand painter. Pick has exhibited frequently at New Zealand public art galleries; a major survey of her work was organised and toured by the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2009-10.

Pick graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 1988. In 1991 she completed a Diploma of Teaching at the Christchurch College of Education.

Early in her career Pick was grouped with other Ilam graduates, such as Tony de Lautour, Shane Cotton, Peter Robinson, Saskia Leek and Bill Hammond under the title of the ‘Pencilcase Painters’, known for a painting style that evoked the doodlings of bored teenagers. Pick drew on many sources for the imagery in her painting, from pop culture magazines to pre-Renaissance paintings to naive art. Writing about her work of the 1990s, curator Lara Strongman notes that ‘Pick frequently incorporated renditions of talismanic objects from her childhood (red boots, party dresses, paper-bag masks, iron bed-frames) in earlier works, leading her practice to be viewed misleadingly as autobiographical’.

Two early residency opportunities (the Olivia Spencer Bower Award in 1994 and the Rita Angus Artist Residency in 1995) enabled Pick to take time away from secondary school art teaching and concentrate on painting full-time. During both residencies she was able to produce bodies of work that ‘built upon her past style and explored new challenges’.

Curator Felicity Milburn has identified several stages to Pick’s artistic development:

Pick's early work employed imagery sourced from significant moments in Art History, making particular use of the Gothic emblems of the Medieval period. By 1994, however, she had developed her own distinctive and captivatingly personal iconography. Works from this period have been described as 'dreamscapes' in which symbolic images from Pick's memory (beds, dresses, pincushions, colanders) float surreally across rich surfaces. These strangely dislocated objects were often domestic in nature, indicating the special significance memory can inject into otherwise everyday objects.

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