2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award Winner
Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction
"Even as an experienced biographer, Gregory O’Brien has achieved a near impossible task in Don Binney: Flight Path. He has encapsulated the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
O’Brien’s respect for Binney includes acknowledging that he could be both charming and curmudgeonly, and as a result he offers a complete picture of this complex and creative man. Equally compelling are the book’s faithfully reproduced artworks, exemplifying the best in design, layout and reproduction. From the cover onwards, the images of the paintings take us to the place where Binney observed the land and the birds, capturing the qualities of whenua that meant so much to him."
A richly illustrated account of the life and work of one of New Zealand's most iconic artists. Painter, printmaker, teacher, writer and ornithologist, Don Binney (1940 - 2012) was a mercurial presence on the New Zealand cultural scene from the time of his meteoric rise to fame in the early 1960s.
His unmistakable, stylised depictions of birds have come to define an era in the development of the nation's art. Don Binney: Flight Path follows the painter from Te Henga / Bethells Beach his artistic tūrangawaewae through his years of wandering not only the length of Aotearoa but as far afield as Latin America and Europe.
Drawing extensively on Binney's letters, journals and other writings, award-winning author and curator Gregory O'Brien takes us into the world of this gifted but paradoxical artist.
Richly illustrated with Binney's paintings, drawings and prints alongside photographs and documentary materials this is the first full-length monograph on one of New Zealand's most important twentieth-century artists.
Gregory O'Brien
Hardback, 400 pages
H: 290mm W: 240mm Spine: 39mm