For Jon Tootill, painting begins outside the studio door. The Karaka-based artist has spent the past decade and a half living among the rhythms of rural Aotearoa, observing how colour moves through the landscape as the seasons turn. Moss deepens after rain, kōwhai erupts into sudden gold, and the sculptural blades of harakeke shift tone with the light. These subtle transformations have become the foundation of a visual language that is unmistakably his own.
Tootill’s latest exhibition at Sanderson celebrates his 75th year and continues this quietly rigorous exploration. At the centre of the new body of work sits the harakeke plant, whose distinctive forms and graphic silhouettes have long fascinated the artist. First appearing in a series he exhibited in 2020, the motif returns here with renewed clarity, its architectural leaves translated into geometric compositions that feel both contemporary and deeply rooted in place.
While the shapes in Tootill’s paintings often appear minimal, their references are rich with cultural and personal memory. Drawing on his Ngāi Tahu heritage, the works echo the visual language of traditional toi Māori practices such as raranga weaving, whakairo carving and tukutuku panelling. These influences are never literal. Instead, they surface through structure and rhythm, with compositions built around grid-like frameworks that quietly nod to the architectural logic of tukutuku panels.
Before returning to painting full-time, Tootill spent many years as a designer and advertising executive at Saatchi & Saatchi. That experience left its imprint. The crisp linearity and graphic precision that define his work today carry the discipline of commercial design, while the colour palettes remain rooted in the organic world around him.
The process behind each work is contemplative. Studies begin as drawings, photographs and watercolours pinned across the studio wall. From these observations, Tootill distils motifs into structured grids before experimenting with colour relationships, often referencing the original plant forms as he works.
The result is paintings that balance stillness with vitality. Structured yet instinctive, minimal yet richly referential. Works that capture not simply the appearance of Aotearoa’s landscape, but the deeper cadence of its seasons.
HARAKEKE by Jon Tootill
Exhibition dates: 1st -26th April 2026
